


the sound of shooting stars

by theseblueskies



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Inspired by a Movie, Journalist Louis, Long Distance Pining, Love Letters, M/M, Single Parent Harry, Sleepless in Seattle AU, architect Harry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2015-11-24
Packaged: 2018-05-02 23:52:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 33,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5268602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theseblueskies/pseuds/theseblueskies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>"It was just a million little things," Harry whispers, so softly that it becomes almost indecipherable through the static buzzing faintly through the speakers in the car radio, "that when you added them all up, they just meant that we were made for each other—like the way her hair always fell into her eyes, or how every time she discovered a new song she liked, she’d play it on repeat for a month.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Louis gets lost in the smooth rise and fall of his speech, in the way he draws out his vowels. Harry’s words are filling up his mind like a smoke machine, and Louis can’t even breathe anymore. He guides his car along the curve of the highway, driving underneath an overpass, and shadows melt through the windows of his car, casting everything in a blend of moonlight and darkness.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Just for a moment, it feels like if Louis turned his head to the side, he would see Harry folded up in the passenger seat beside him.</em>
</p><p>Or, a Sleepless in Seattle AU where Harry is Sam, Louis is Annie, and the universe has a twisted sense of humor. Guest starring: fate, magic, destiny, and one little girl who unknowingly changes everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. spent so long running

**Author's Note:**

> fic and chapter titles are from [stole you away](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfe_x23Rzuk) by benjamin francis leftwich.
> 
> without the love and support of a few very special people, i wouldn't have even come close to finishing this.
> 
> [jo](louhearted.tumblr.com), thank you for being with me since day one. you were the first person i ever told about my idea, and you're almost more invested in it than i am. [charlie](glassesharry.tumblr.com), thank you for being the first person to read over all of this completely, and for always being willing to cry with me. [mae](wecouldliveforever.tumblr.com), thank you for loving this movie just as much as i do and for making such a beautiful edit for it!!! [lex](dreamscapeswift.tumblr.com), thank you for supporting me throughout this journey. i still don't understand how you didn't cry while watching sleepless though. i'll crack you some day. and [olivia](1dsharold.tumblr.com), thank you for cheering me on and reading little snippits here and there as i randomly texted them to you. i'm so thankful you sent me that tumblr ask :-)
> 
>  **disclaimer:** this fic is inspired by the movie sleepless in seattle. all credit to the storyline goes to the directors and writers of the movie, this wasn't my original idea, etc. that being said, i did tweak it and take bits out where i saw fit. if you haven't seen it, you might want to watch the [trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4Ll-xXjjXc) before you read this. or not; that's cool too. whatever floats your boat.
> 
>  **just a few fyi's:** a) because it isn't actually explained in the story, i'll say it here: harry is bisexual in this fic. b) i started this fic before zayn left the band and before sophiam broke up, so sorry about that. i just couldn't take out their characters because they're kind of essential to certain parts of the story. c) yes, harry and nick go on a date or two, and yes, louis and aiden are engaged, but i swear nothing comes of either of them, and this is 100% endgame larry.
> 
> anyway, i hope you enjoy. ♡

 

**— H —**

When Harry steps out of the elevator on Monday morning, he’s already wishing he’d called in another sick day. Either that, or drowned himself in the shower this morning, but he has a feeling his mother would’ve resurrected him and killed him herself (even though it would’ve been kind of counterproductive).

It’s his first day back at work since Lizzie’s funeral, and it’s unnerving, to say the very least. The artificial lights that shine down from the ceiling are casting everything in the open layout of office cubicles in a pale, sickly gray light. The unsteady hum of the air vents, combined with the clicking of fingernails on computer keys and pencils sketching out blueprints, give rise to yet another pounding headache in Harry’s head.

He’s already had three today, and it’s not even 8:30 yet.

He sighs, gripping the handle on his briefcase so tightly that the skin on his knuckles turns white. It’s only when he blinks his eyes into focus that he notices a group of women—who Harry’s heard are rumored to gossip about their coworkers even in their sleep—huddled around the water cooler by the window. They’re all whispering to each other and side-eyeing him like he's got some kind of communicable disease, and it makes the hair on the back of Harry’s neck stand up as he passes them on his way to his desk. He tries to ignore their stares, but it's not like he isn't used to it by now. It's been happening a lot since Lizzie passed.

He can still feel their eyes trained on him as he slumps down into his desk chair. He takes a deep breath, holding it in for as long as he can until the carbon dioxide builds up in his lungs and he’s forced to exhale. It's going to be a long, arduous day. Suffice it to say he's _seriously_ not looking forward to it, not even in the slightest.

"Good morning, Harry!" Eleanor’s voice chirps from beside him. She sounds like she's drank about four cups of coffee so far today, but Harry honestly wouldn't put it past her. It's not exactly a well-kept secret that Eleanor is a caffeine addict—or more specifically, a sucker for an overpriced cup of Starbucks and a trademark green bendy straw.

Harry swivels around in his chair to look over the left wall of his cubicle. He can just barely make out Eleanor’s familiar brown eyes above the divider.

"Hi, El," he says. He pastes a smile on his face and greets her with a slightly awkward wave, and though he can feel her gaze on the dark circles under his eyes, she thankfully doesn't comment on them.

“I missed you over the weekend,” Eleanor tells him instead. She smiles at him, or at least Harry _thinks_ she’s smiling, if her eyes scrunching is anything to go by. Her enthusiasm is slightly overwhelming, but Harry’s grown used to it in the time he’s known her. He’s thankful that she’s treating him like a normal human being, like it's just another dreary Monday to start off the endless cycle of the work week and not one of the worst days in Harry's entire life. "You might not believe me, but I'm not even exaggerating when I say our corner of the office was getting pretty boring without you."

Harry laughs as she tilts her head in the direction of Perrie's cubicle, to the other side of him, and whispers, "We kept getting flower deliveries, and all Perrie did was complain about how pretty they were and how sad she was because of her lack of a sense of smell. God forbid any of us forget she’s an asonmic for one day."

"Hey!" Perrie hisses in protest, clearly having overheard her. She chucks a wad of blueprint paper over Harry, landing a perfect shot at Eleanor's forehead. "You people have no sympathy, I swear. And it’s _anosmic_ , smart ass. I’m going to form an organization called Anosmics Anonymous one day. We’re going to work together to fight against the ignorance of society."

"And how are you gonna do that, exactly?" Eleanor asks while Perrie’s busy sniffing the air like an aristocrat. "File a complaint with the government? Sue the White House?” Prompted by Perrie’s eye roll, she grins, barely able to speak through her laughs, “Or, wait, even better: write a letter to Obama! Just don’t forget to let me kiss the envelope before you mail it.”

It's not as hard as Harry thought it would be for him to muster up a genuine laugh at their usual sisterly bickering. The smudges of pencil lead and pen ink that stain the fingertips of their wildly-gesticulating hands are comforting familiarities, just like the illegible reminders scribbled onto the backs of their hands and on the undersides of their wrists. It's little things like those, little traces of home, that make it easier for Harry to breathe.

Perrie and Eleanor eventually quiet down after exchanging insults that basically equate to “I know you are, but what am I?” Harry plugs his headphones into his phone and puts on one of his softer playlists. It has slower songs, ones by [The Fray](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfGRUCsObZ0) and [Jose Gonzalez](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhA3k3WiaoI) that are calming, songs that he hopes can ease the pressure building in his temples. He opens one of his desk drawers in search of a cough drop to soothe his dry throat, pretends like he doesn't notice Perrie eyeing his fumbling fingers warily over the wall separating their cubicles, and pulls out his sketches for the remodeling of the downtown public library.

He’s focused for a solid hour and a half, redrawing the outlines of all of the windows to fit the scale of the columns bordering the main entrance. He’s built up an impressive pile of eraser shavings by the time he takes a break to rest his hand, but then he gets distracted when the white noise of the office becomes audible through his music. He ends up staring blankly through the windows on the other side of the room, Wrigley Field just barely recognizable in the distance if he squints hard enough. Memories flash through his mind, of vanilla ice cream cones piled high with sprinkles, ketchup dripping off the ends of hot dogs, bits of Gracie's popcorn getting stuck to the bottoms of his sneakers, fireworks behind the scoreboard on the Fourth of July.

He thinks of Lizzie, grinning at him from underneath her faded blue and red baseball cap. Memories flicker through his mind like the reel of an old fashioned movie, of her blonde hair glowing golden in the daylight, caressed by the fingertips of the sun, and of her freckled cheeks and crow’s feet tugging at the corners of her eyes. He thinks of all the times he'd seen his smile reflected back at him in her sunglasses that were too big for her face, of all the times they'd had to carry a sleeping Gracie back to their car after the end of the game, back when it was the three of them against the world. The memories make tears prick in his eyes.

"Hey, Harry?" Perrie's voice suddenly pulls him out of his reverie.

He pauses his music and takes his headphones out of his ears. “Yeah?” he tries to say, but the word gets snagged on the lump in his throat. He swallows, his shaky fingers fiddling with the paperclips in the dish by his computer.

"You look a bit pale," Eleanor tells him. When he turns to look at her, she has a frown on her face that mirrors Perrie’s expression exactly. "Are you alright?"

Harry sucks on the remnants of his third cough drop and looks back and forth between them. He's on the brink of making an excuse to escape their conversation, to say that he needs to pee or get more staples from the supply closet. Anything to get him a moment alone with his thoughts, because if one more person looks at him like they’re afraid he’s going to shatter, he thinks he’s actually going to spontaneously combust.

But then he looks at them again, at their wide doe eyes and hesitant smiles, and he knows they're only asking because they care about him, and they’re concerned for him. They really do mean well, and that’s what makes the rainclouds hanging over Harry’s head disperse a little bit. He tries to smile.

"It's just been a long week," he finally says with a sigh, "but I'm… I’ll be okay."

Neither of them looks convinced.

“Are you sure?" Perrie bites her lip and shares a concerned glance with Eleanor over his head. Harry looks down, staring absentmindedly at the paperclip chain he’s subconsciously created. He barely registers the second half of Perrie’s question ("Do you need anything? Just say the word and a glass of water will be on your desk, pronto”) because his mind is suddenly honing in on one thought, and one thought in particular.

"I think I need a change,” Harry says quietly, mostly to himself.

"What, you mean, like, something other than water?” Eleanor asks, having assumed Harry had been responding to Perrie’s question. “I think there’s some cranberry juice left.” She frowns like she's mentally going through the shelves of the fridge in the break room. “No, wait, someone drank the rest of it..."

Harry can't help but smile as he shakes his head, blinking himself out of his daze. "I meant a different kind of change than that, but I appreciate your dedication to my wellbeing."

Perrie’s studying him intently. “What kind of change are we talking about, H?”

"A real change,” he says quietly. It’s the most honest thing he’s said in a while, and it knocks the breath out of him. He’s finally voicing the thought that’s been keeping him up late at night for the past two weeks, tossing and turning when he should’ve been sleeping. He watches realization dawn in their eyes, and offers them a watery smile. “A new city.” He looks out at the Chicago skyline and blinks away the tears that are resurfacing in his eyes. “Some place where every time I go around the corner, I don't think of Lizzie."

Eleanor sucks her teeth, her entire body drooping like a flower wilting in the rain. “Oh, Harry,” she whispers in understanding.

It’s quiet for a long moment, until Harry thinks he’ll be able to speak without his voice breaking.

"I was thinking about Seattle," he admits, even quieter than before.

Their reaction to his statement is so sudden that it would be laughable in any other circumstance. Eleanor flinches, leaning so far backwards in her chair that she nearly overbalances, and Perrie is so shocked that her jaw unhinges and hits the dusty carpet below their feet with a nearly audible thud.

“Seattle!” Eleanor gasps once she’s regained control of her limbs. “I was thinking you’d say Springfield, or Milwaukee, but Seattle is—” she stops to take a deep breath, and ultimately ends with a whispered, half-hearted, “so far away.”

Almost like they’d planned it beforehand, they’re out of their chairs and smushed together in a teary group hug before any of them have the chance to even blink.

Perrie exhales a shaky breath, biting her lip so hard that it loses all its color. "If you don't keep in touch with us, I'll actually break your nose," she threatens, holding up her fist menacingly.

Eleanor nods, humming in agreement while she sniffles and wipes at her damp eyes.

God, Harry's seriously going to miss them.

 **— L —**  
_18 months later_

"So, Lottie is the oldest," Aiden is saying as they struggle to step through the front door. The amount of presents and shopping bags they're both carrying definitely doesn't make it any easier, but they eventually manage to make it to the sidewalk with all of their limbs still intact.

Louis pulls the door shut behind them, unlooping his keys from around his fingers. "You'll recognize her by the baby in her arms and her insanely dyed hair," he adds as he locks the door.

To the best of his knowledge, Lottie's hair is back to a natural blonde color now and has been for months, but you can never be too sure with her. She’s caught in the mindset that since she teaches art to elementary school kids, she won’t be considered a cool teacher unless she expresses her creative style in obvious and crazy ways—like her hair color, for example, or her mixed and matched outfits that she comes up with herself. He has a feeling she might be heading towards the warm side of the color wheel for her next shade of hair, but he wouldn’t bet on it. Lottie is about as unpredictable as you can get.

"Félicité is the brunette," Aiden continues, like he’s reading off a list. "She's called Fizzy and she's the...” He glances at Louis uncertainly as they split up to their respective cars, parked one behind the other on the street corner. “Second oldest?”

Having eight people in Louis' family to buy presents for means they have to take separate cars. Ah, the price Louis (literally) pays to spend time with his family.

Louis nods his head in approval. “And she looks exactly like my mother," he finishes her description as he unlocks the trunk of his car.

"Whose name is Johannah, but she goes by Jay," Aiden fires back, "married to Dan."

When his mother had called him to invite them over for dinner on Christmas Eve, Louis had accidentally let it slip that Aiden had popped the question (because if there's anyone who's better at weeding information out of people than Louis is, it's his mother). Aiden hasn't outright said it, but Louis knows he's been reviewing the members of Louis' family religiously for the past week.

Honestly, he wouldn't be all that surprised if Aiden has flashcards in the pockets of his coat.

"And the twins?" Louis asks as he stuffs the last present in the trunk and goes to open his car door.

"Phoebe and... Oh, shit. It's some kind of flower, isn't it?" Aiden waves his arm around in the air as if that'll help him remember, starting to say random letters until one sparks his memory. "Mmm, wait no—Rrrrr—Daisy!" he cries triumphantly.

Louis raises his eyebrows at him, the line of his mouth wiggling with his effort to contain his smile. "You're forgetting a pair."

Aiden frowns. "Right, you're right, there're two sets of twins. Aren't they the youngest? They won't care if I mix up their names, will they?"

"Well, they are preteens," Louis says, trying not to laugh at the put-out look on Aiden’s face, "and one's a boy and one's a girl, so you shouldn't have too much trouble."

"I'm hopeless. Hopeless, I tell you!" Aiden sighs as he puts the last of the presents in the backseat of his car. "I don't see how I'm going to remember all of them, Lou.”

"Aiiiiiden," Louis sings as he sits down in the driver's seat and grins at him. "You will!"

He's about to put the key in the ignition when Aiden suddenly calls out, "Hey, Louis?” He stumbles as he makes his way along the curb, wobbling like he’s a tightrope walker until he gets to Louis' car. "Am I what they had in mind?"

For a moment, Louis simply blinks at him in polite confusion, but then he takes one look at him and realizes he’s asking if Louis’ parents will accept him. The color is drained from his face and he looks scared out of his wits, and Louis hasn’t seen him this scared since he was on the verge of getting downsized at work.

Louis smiles at Aiden, trying his best to look reassuring.

"Babe," he says, pressing a kiss to his cheek. "They're going to love you."

**—**

Later, when they're all gathered in the living room of Louis’ childhood home, Lego sets and magazine pages and his mother’s crazy DIY projects surrounding them like the sea, Louis has half a mind to feel bad for Aiden.

He's currently being grilled by Doris and Ernest on which Hogwarts house the sorting hat would assign him if he were in Harry Potter, because it's apparently _very_ important that he understands the only way you get into Gryffindor is if you ask the sorting hat to put you in there specifically. He looks like he's breaking a sweat, the poor guy, but luckily he's saved when Jay calls for the twins to help her set the table.

Louis swears he sees him breathe a sigh of relief.

It’s then that the door opens and Lottie arrives, her husband and baby in tow. The dip-dyed ends of her hair fall somewhere within the purple area of the color wheel, and Louis is a psychic, through and through. A chorus of "Lottie!" ranging in enthusiasm and pitch greets her, overpowering the gentle rasp of Tony Bennett singing Winter Wonderland, and through the process of everyone hauling themselves off the couches and floor to fall into a slightly hazardous and chaotic sibling group hug, Aiden somehow gets stuck holding the baby.

It takes Louis an entire thirty seconds to realize Aiden still hasn't said anything, not even the customary, “It’s so good to meet you!” When he looks back at Aiden, it's immediately clear why. He’s frozen, holding baby Claire with his arms outstretched, like he's holding a grenade in a minefield.

Louis peels himself out from where he’d been squished between Fizzy and Daisy, all marveling over how good Lottie’s figure already looks, having given birth just four months ago. "I'll take her from you," he says, cooing and reaching out for baby Claire.

She babbles a happy, "Ooey ooey ooey!" back at him as she curls into his side, because apparently she hasn't figured out how to say the letter L yet, and tugs on his earlobes. She looks like an exact replica of Lottie when she was this age, and it never ceases to amaze him how babies can make the exact same expressions as their parents. Ah, the wonders of procreation.

Aiden shoots him a grateful look and wipes his sweaty hands off on his pants.

"You okay?" Louis asks him. He doesn't think he's ever seen anyone react this weirdly to holding a baby before, and that’s saying something compared to Zayn, Louis' best friend from work. He's a far stretch from being a baby-carrying guru, but even he doesn't get this bad.

"Yeah, I'm okay," Aiden says, carefully taking a step back to increase the distance between him and Claire. He probably thinks his small step goes unnoticed, but Louis catches Lottie and Fizzy raising their eyebrows at each other. "I'm just not much of a baby person, that’s all."

A hush falls upon the room as everyone stares at him with their mouths open.

"What do you mean, you're not much of a baby person?" Daisy asks, looking at him like he's just spoken in another language, but before Aiden can explain himself, Jay yells from the kitchen that dinner's ready.

Louis' siblings shuffle past Aiden as they head down the hall. Most of them are giving him weird looks, and now Aiden looks even more nauseous than before.

"Don't worry about it, they’re just kidding,” Louis whispers to him, but honestly, he's a bit baffled himself.

By the time he and Aiden make it into the dining room, Phoebe and Ernest have stolen the prime spots smack in the middle of the table and right in front of the turkey. Doris is grumbling with her arms crossed over her chest about how she should get Ernie's spot since she's the older twin. He sticks his tongue out at her and wiggles his fingers by his ears.

Louis hands Claire to Lottie and guides Aiden around the table to sit on the opposite side, a safe distance from his younger siblings and any threats of airborne food. He waits a few minutes until everyone is seated civilly (or as civilized as the Tomlinson family will ever be) and the serving bowls have begun their rounds to stand up and tap his wine glass with a fork.

"Everyone," Jay says, raising her voice to be heard. "Louis has an announcement!"

Louis waits until Daisy and Phoebe have worked out who between the two of them should get the first scoop of the cranberry sauce to say, "Aiden and I are engaged!"

There's a second of silence before everyone starts talking at once. Half of his siblings seem to be excited for them and half of them seem to be confused, or worse, upset.

“You knew!” Doris shrieks, pointing an accusing finger at their mother, who does not look shocked in the slightest. She accidentally elbows Ernie's arm, and the spoonful of sweet corn he'd been trying to shovel into his mouth goes flying and hits Claire in the face.

"Ernie!" Lottie shouts when Claire bursts into tears, rushing to grab a napkin.

"I don't see a ring, Louis!" Fizzy is saying in his ear, side-eyeing Aiden. Daisy and Phoebe both try to get the first look at his left hand, which ends in them bumping into each other's foreheads and yelling out in pain.

“That’s because I proposed to him with a strawberry Ring Pop,” Aiden tells her, smiling awkwardly in an attempt to get a rise out of Louis’ sisters. It mostly just leads to all of them blinking at him in confusion.

“I swear we had some champagne," Dan is muttering to Jay, disappearing into the kitchen. He comes back a moment later bearing a bottle and an armful of champagne flutes, and Louis and Lottie rush to help him set them in front of all of the adults.

"Aiden," Lottie intones as she hands him a glass. He flinches, the serving spoon in his hand clinking loudly against the inside of the bowl of mashed potatoes. "I don't know if you've seen what Louis looked like in his twink phase, but I'd advise you to look at a photo or two of him in suspenders before you’re committed to him for life."

Louis rolls his eyes as he pours champagne into her glass, but he's smiling.

**—**

After everyone's gotten a slice of Louis' birthday cake and have moved into the family room with mugs of hot cider, Jay gestures for Louis to follow her. She leads him up the stairs, passed the twins’ room where Ernie is trying desperately to get baby Claire to care about Mario Kart and up into the attic, where she pulls out a box from behind the old tv.

"I want to show you something," she says, smiling at him and carefully blowing dust off the top of the box. She uncovers it to reveal a sleek black photo album sitting in a bed of packing peanuts, and when she lifts it out of the box, Louis recognizes the photo of her and Dan embedded into the front cover immediately. It's their wedding album.

Louis marvels at it, taking it from her and carefully setting it onto his lap. "I always forget how beautiful you looked," he breathes while he runs his fingers along the crinkly material covering the photograph.

Jay watches him fondly as he flips it open to the first page. They're quiet for a few minutes while they reminisce. Eventually, she places a hand on his arm, and he looks up. The shadows in the attic cast lines across her face, but her blue eyes are kind.

"Aiden's a lovely man, Louis," she tells him quietly, sincerely.

"I know, isn't he?" Louis' face breaks out into a giddy smile, and Jay smiles back.

"Are his parents nice?" she asks him.

"You'd love his mother. She's an absolute trip," he tells her, sitting down in the old refurbished rocking chair to unlace his dress shoes. He can only stand his toes being pinched by stiff leather for so long. "We're driving down to D.C. tonight to be with them Christmas morning."

Jay sighs, but she's still smiling. "I can't believe my baby's getting married," she whispers to herself as she stares at a picture of her and Louis hugging on her wedding day. She seems to get stuck in the memories from that day for a moment, and Louis watches her as she blinks herself out of her daze before turning to look at him curiously.

"How did it happen; how did you meet? You've never told me the whole story, you know."

"Well," Louis drawls, his brain feeling a little fuzzy even though he's only had two glasses of champagne. He takes his time reading all of the captions Jay's scribbled neatly underneath each photograph, and tells her while he turns the page, "It's kind of silly, really."

"I don't have all day, Louis." Jay's looking at him expectantly. "There are children to attend to, presents to open..." she trails off, obviously waiting for him to elaborate, and she's smirking. Louis rolls his eyes.

"Oh, alright. So, I'd seen him at the office—I mean, obviously I'd seen him, he's the associate publisher—" he pauses to laugh at himself as he slips off his shoes, "but I'd never actually spoken to him before. And then one day, we both ordered lunch from the same sandwich place."

Jay hums to let him know she's still listening, looking at him with a smile on her face.

"There was a mix-up with the orders and we got each other's food by accident; I got his roast beef on whole wheat, and he got my roast beef on rye, and... that was it. It just kind of happened."

"Amazing," Jay summarizes his retelling for him, and he looks up at her, pleased.

"It is, isn't it? You make a million decisions that mean nothing, and then one day, out of the blue, you order takeout and it changes your life."

Jay's expression turns dreamy. "Destiny takes a hand," she whispers, flipping forward a page in the photo album.

Louis waves her thought away as he pulls off his socks. "Destiny is something that we've invented because we can't stand the fact that everything that happens is accidental."

Now she's frowning at him. "Then how do you explain that you both got exactly the same sandwich as each other, except for the bread? How many people order sandwiches from that place every day, and you two were the only ones who got switched? It's a sign if I've ever heard of one."

"It wasn't a sign, mum," Louis tells her, frowning stubbornly. "It was a coincidence."

Jay pouts at him like he's spoiling her fun, but then they turn to the picture of her and Dan walking down the steps of the gazebo, and she's retelling the story of how they met. Her eyes look far away as she talks about how she was waiting in a restaurant for her blind date, and Dan was the waiter that kept coming back to her table to refill her water glass.

"I've probably told you this story a million times, but I don't even care," she suddenly says to Louis. He just laughs. "And right when I finally realized my date wouldn't show, he came over again to ask if I wanted him to help me to my car. I looked up at him then, at the look in his eyes, and... I knew."

She pauses, staring off into space. Louis isn’t following her train of thought.

"What?" he asks. "You knew what?"

"You know," Jay says with a wave of her hand, and Louis still has no idea what she's talking about. From the way she's saying it, he feels like it's something he ought to know, or should have experienced, but he's honestly clueless as to what it could be.

He shakes his head at her again. "What?"

"Magic," she whispers, "it was _magic_."

"Magic," Louis repeats slowly, mulling it over, because now he's thinking back to that day in the sandwich shop when Aiden got handed Louis' lunch by mistake, and he can't for the life of him remember how he felt.

"I knew we'd be together forever," Jay's saying now, "and that everything would finally be perfect for me." She pauses to sigh dreamily, and then she looks at Louis.

"But what am I saying," his mother laughs at herself, and Louis has a weird feeling forming in the pit of his stomach. "That's just the way you feel about Aiden, isn't it?"

She smiles at him, turning the page in her wedding album to a picture of Daisy and Phoebe. They're grinning, standing proud and tall in their pale pink bridesmaid's dresses, and Jay instantly starts cooing over them. She doesn't notice the way Louis' staring down at his hands.

**—**

When they've said their last goodbyes, wished everyone and their left sock a Merry Christmas, and are walking across the lawn to their cars, Aiden turns to look at him.

"Are you sure you don't want to drive down with me?" he asks.

Louis shakes his head apologetically. "How will I get back to Baltimore on Friday if I don’t take my car?" he reasons, and then stops in his tracks. The snow crunches under his boots as he spins around. "Shit, I forgot my birthday presents!" he swears, turning to Aiden. "I left them right by the door, too, I don't know how on earth I missed them!"

"I'll wait out here," Aiden tells him, and Louis' almost to the front door when he turns around.

"No, don't wait!" he calls, sounding almost crazed. He'll blame it on all the mulled wine Lottie convinced him it would be a good idea to drink. "Really, babe, it's silly. You go on ahead, we're late anyway."

"Are you sure?" Aiden looks hesitant. "I really don't mind waiting for you, honestly."

Louis smiles at him and comes back to press a kiss to his cheek. "I'll only be ten minutes behind you, I promise."

By the time Louis locates the missing gifts and manages to escape his siblings again, all of whom are whining about the fact that they've barely seen him and it's his _birthday_ no less, Louis is twenty minutes behind schedule. A mashup of Sleigh Ride and Jingle Bells is playing on the radio when he gets back into his car, and he hums along as he drives through his parents' residential neighborhood in the direction of the highway.

"Outside the snow is falling and friends are calling yoo hoo," the radio sings.

"Friends are calling yoo hoo, ding-a-ling-a- _liiiing_ ," Louis echoes off pitch, nodding his head to the steady background vocals singing _horses, horses, horses, horses_ and grinning to himself as he copies the weird way the ladies are pronouncing the words.

The lead singer starts on the chorus of Jingle Bells, and Louis switches the radio station. He's heard that song playing in department stores enough times this month that he's almost sick of it.

"Welcome back to You and Your Emotions," a woman is saying as Louis continues carrying the tune of Sleigh Ride under his breath. "I'm Dr. Viviane Wilde, broadcasting to you live from the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago. Tonight, our topic is wishes and dreams. What's your wish this Christmas Eve? Maybe the best present you can give yourself is a call to me..."

"'What's your wish?'" Louis mimics her voice as he reaches to turn the dial. "My wish is to change the radio station."

"The subject of this evening's medical update is you and your uvula," a man’s dull voice is in the middle of droning on the station Louis flips to.

"Not on your life," Louis mutters, grimacing.

"Up next," an overly cheery girl is saying on the next station he lands on, "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer sung backwards!"

Louis laughs despite himself, but even he doesn't think he could listen to that without getting a splitting headache. He turns the dial again and lands on the first radio station he'd been listening to, the one where Dr. Wilde is asking about wishes and dreams.

"...from Seattle," the woman says, in the middle of introducing the next caller.

"Hi," a little girl says tentatively, and Louis picks up on her British accent almost instantly. It makes him sit up straighter in his seat. "This is Gracie St—" Her voice gets bleeped.

"No last names, Gracie," Dr. Wilde tells her gently. "You sound younger than my usual callers. How old are you?"

"Um..." There's a pause before Gracie fully answers her, like she's not sure if she's allowed to say it. "I'm eight."

Louis can't help but smile at how cute she is. She reminds him of when Daisy and Phoebe were little girls, and it makes his heart twinge a little in his chest.

"Eight!" Dr. Wilde sounds surprised. "I appreciate you being up so late to talk to me."

"It's not really that late in Seattle."

Dr. Wilde laughs at her correction, innocent and matter of fact in the way only an eight-year-old can be. "Right, of course. I forgot about the time zone difference. What's your Christmas wish?"

"Well," Gracie starts, unsure. "It's not actually for me... It's for my dad. I think he needs someone new."

"By someone, do you mean a new wife?" Dr. Wilde asks her, and Gracie hums in agreement. "Why? Is there something wrong with the one he has now?"

"No, that's the problem," Gracie tells her sadly. "He doesn't have one now."

Dr. Wilde hesitates before asking, "Well, where's your mom?"

It takes Gracie a moment to answer. "She died," she says quietly. Louis' eyes widen and his lips turn down into a frown as she goes on to say, "I've been really sad about it lately, but I think my dad's been worse."

"Have you talked to him?" Dr. Wilde asks.

"Not really," Gracie admits quietly.

"Why not?"

"I think it just makes him more upset." She says it so softly that it makes Louis grip the steering wheel tighter, because he can hear the amount of sadness in her voice, and it's making his chest ache. He bites his lip as he glances up in the rear view mirror, signaling to change lanes.

"Gracie, is your dad home right now?"

"Yeah, he’s, um—out on the deck." The way she says it makes Louis think she's said it a lot, and he wonders how many other people have called to talk to her father.

Dr. Wilde sounds pleased with that answer, and Louis has an inkling he knows where this is going. "Is he busy?"

"I don’t know," Gracie hesitates, and then there's a rustling and the faint sound of bare feet going down a flight of stairs. "He's just singing to himself out there," she says eventually.

"Well, I'm sure that I can help," Dr. Wilde says, "but I'm going to need you to help me."

Louis gasps. "Wretched woman!" he says to himself, outraged, as she goes on to tell Gracie to bring her dad over to the phone. "Hang up, Gracie. Don't listen to her!"

Gracie sounds as against it as Louis is. "No way," she cries indignantly, "he'd _kill_ me!"

"Trust me, Gracie." Dr. Wilde makes her voice sound more gentle and soothing, and Louis wonders if she gets paid based on the number of times she invades people's private lives. "He won't be angry when he finds out how concerned you are about him."

Louis scoffs. "Wanna bet?"

“I guess not...” Gracie sounds apprehensive, and Louis doesn’t blame her, "but if I get grounded, I’m never gonna listen to your show ever again.”

“Okay, deal,” Dr. Wilde says around a laugh, and Louis doesn’t know when he started smiling like a lunatic, but what he does know is that this little girl is incredibly endearing and a lot a bit cheeky.

Gracie’s end of the call becomes muffled, like she’s just pressed the phone to her shirt, but it still picks up her voice as she yells out, “Daaaaad, there’s someone on the phone for you!” A second later, she adds, this time into the receiver, “His name’s Harry.”

"Harry," Dr. Wilde repeats, and then there’s a pause as she waits for him to get the phone.

_“If you’ve just tuned in, this is Dr. Viviane Wilde. Tonight’s topic is your wishes and dreams, and we’re on the line now with someone from Seattle…”_

**— H —**

When Harry answers the phone, there’s a woman’s voice on the other end of the line that’s smooth and weirdly robotic. It’d be perfect for the automated voice that tells you what stop is next on the public transit buses, and he swears if this is another campaign call, he’s going to sue whoever keeps giving out his phone number.

“Hi, Harry. This is Dr. Viviane Wilde from Network America. How are you?”

Now Harry’s more than confused. “I’m alright,” he says slowly, keeping his eyes trained on Gracie. He mouths to her _what is this about?_ so the woman on the phone can't hear him, but Gracie shrinks back behind the coatrack and doesn't reply.

“If you’re trying to sell me something, I’m sorry, but I’m not interested. I’ve got my eye on this really cool electric toothbrush and I have to watch my spending money.”

The woman’s laugh sounds tinny, and it makes Harry frown. “I’m not selling anything; I just want to help. Your daughter called looking for advice on how to help you find a new spouse.”

“I’m sorry, who is this again?” is all Harry can think of to say as he gapes at Gracie.

“Dr. Viviane Wilde of Network America,” the woman tells him patiently, “and you are on the air!”

He must look angry when he hears that, because Gracie flinches and presses her face deeper into Harry’s winter coat, so that only her eyes are visible.

"Hang on, you called the radio station?” he whisper-yells at her, but now she won’t look him in the eye.

“Harry, your daughter feels that since your wife’s death, you haven’t been the same. From what I can tell, she’s very worried about you,” Dr. Wilde explains, and Harry feels a bit like he’s being ganged up on.

“Gray,” he calls, beckoning her over with a wave of his hand. When she refuses to move, he sighs, stepping closer to her and pressing the phone against his shirt. “Gracie, please come over here. You can’t let me go through this alone, what if she's an undercover agent and she's plotting my demise?” he pleads, and she squints as if to study him, a smile tugging at the corners of her eyes because of how stupid he sounds.

Dr. Wilde keeps asking if he’s still there, so he hums into the phone while he settles on the couch. Gracie pads over to him, her mismatched Shaun the sheep and striped rainbow socks making cute little padding noises along the floor panels. She lies down horizontally with her head in his lap, huffing at him when he glares and whispers, "You've betrayed me, Gracie Gray."

“I think it’s very difficult for her to talk to you about this,” Dr. Wilde is saying now. “It’s very important that you talk about these things when they happen. I understand that it can be hard to discuss with your daughter, so I thought maybe you and I could talk about it instead.”

When Harry goes to protest, she politely interrupts with, “and I know it would make Gracie feel a whole lot better."

Well, Harry can't really argue with that, can he?

A tiny, cold fingertip touches his elbow. He glances down at Gracie and thumbs the skin below her bottom eyelashes. “Please talk to her, Dad,  _please_. She’s a doctor.”

“A doctor of what?” Harry asks defensively. “Her first name could be Doctor!”

Gracie’s bottom lip starts to tremble. “But it’s my Christmas wish,” she whispers sadly, knowing full well he’s never stood a chance against her pouty face.

“Oh, alright,” Harry gives in after an intense few seconds of stubbornly holding her gaze. He shifts around until he’s comfortable enough to settle back into the couch cushions without straining his back.

“Thank you,” Dr. Wilde says, and she sounds like she means it. “Now, I know this is hard to think about, but how long ago did your wife pass away?”

He hears Gracie sigh through her nose, and when he looks down, he sees her watching him with wet eyes. He tries to answer, but his voice doesn’t work the first time.

“Um,” he tries again, clearing his throat. “About a year and a half ago.”

Dr. Wilde makes a noise like it saddens her, and Harry knows the feeling.

“Have you had any relationships since then?”

He looks through the window and out at the marina, at the lights glittering in the houses lining the opposite side and the way the moonlight shimmers across the surface of the water.

“No,” he says softly, and it’s barely loud enough to make it through the phone.

“Why is that?” she asks him, and what kind of person asks a widowed man why he hasn’t moved on from his wife’s death yet?

“Excuse me, Dr. Wilde, I don’t mean to be rude—” Harry starts to say, leaning forward and running a hand through his hair unconsciously. He tries to think of an excuse for why he has to leave.

“And neither do I.” She rushes to assure him that she doesn’t mean to make him uncomfortable, and it sounds so scripted that Harry can’t help but mumble under his breath, “Oh, sure you don’t.”

“Harry, I really am sorry. I’m here for you,” Dr. Wilde says, and Harry bites his lip and starts picking at a loose thread in his jeans.

He takes a shaky breath. "Gracie and I had a really tough time with it, as you can imagine, but...” He looks down at his daughter, the little girl he promised Lizzie he’d do anything for. She’s pressing her face into the sleeves of her reindeer sweater, her shoulders shaking. Harry runs his hands through her hair the same way he's always done when she's woken up from a nightmare or banged her elbow on the coffee table. They both take comfort in having their hair touched, and it makes Harry smile.

“She and I are a team," he says, continuing where he'd left off. His smile turns fond when she peeks her big green eyes out to look up at him. Her eyelashes are sticking together, and they look like tiny spikes. "And we're dealing with it, together. We help each other heal.”

Dr. Wilde sighs like she’s enraptured with the words coming out of Harry’s mouth. “I have no doubt in my mind that you’re a wonderful father,” she tells him sincerely, “but Harry, there must be something missing if Gracie still feels like she can’t talk always to you about her mom, about how losing her has affected you.”

A lump has begun to form in Harry’s throat. He plays with some of the springy bits in Gracie’s hair and stays quiet.

“Are you sleeping at night?” Dr. Wilde asks.

Before Harry can answer, Gracie speaks up, loud enough so that her voice is picked up by the receiver and Dr. Wilde can hear her. “He isn’t,” she says, matter-of-factly.

“Heeeey,” Harry protests, narrowing his eyes despite his growing smile. “How do you know that?”

Gracie gives him a flat look. “Because I _live_ here, Dad.”

“Look, Dr. Wilde,” Harry mumbles defensively, "it’s almost Christmas, and…” He’s about to tell her it’s getting late and he still has presents to wrap, but then Lizzie’s soothing voice pops into his head and it makes him stay on the line. He knows she’d want him to do this, to talk about how losing her is eating away at him from the inside. All she ever wanted was for him to be happy.

Harry sighs the sigh of a defeated man that’s got nothing left to lose and tries to pretend like every word he says isn't being broadcasted across the country.

“Lizzie—that’s her name, um, my wife,” he says, his voice catching on the ever present lump in his throat. He pauses to run his hand down his face, and Gracie looks up at him. There are tears glistening in her eyes, reflecting the red and green and yellow lights strung up on their Christmas tree.

“She made everything beautiful,” he whispers, pausing to wipe underneath Gracie’s eyes with his fingertips. “And it’s just tough, this time of year, because..." He swallows and takes a deep breath. "It makes me think about how I’m all Gracie’s got, you know? I’m all she has, and I just—I wish there was someone else here for her, too.”

After a moment's deliberation, Dr. Wilde says, “Could it be that you need someone just as much as Gracie does?” and that’s it, that’s what breaks the dam.

The tears well up in Harry’s eyes and pour down his face like raindrops on a window in the middle of a hurricane, and next thing he knows, Gracie’s arms are wrapped around his shoulders and her face is buried in his neck and it _hurts_ , he misses Lizzie so _much_.

“Don’t answer that,” Dr. Wilde tells him quietly, and for the first time during this entire phone call, he’s grateful for her being on the other line. “We’ll talk more about it right after this.” She pauses, and Harry takes the time to shrug his shoulder up to wipe his tear tracks off on the sleeve of his t-shirt.

_“If you’ve just tuned in, we’re talking to Sleepless in Seattle, and we’ll be right back after this break with your listener response…”_

“Listener response?” Harry whispers to Gracie, sniffling as a commercial starts playing through the phone. "What's the listener's response?"

“This is when other people get to call in and dump on what you said,” she explains nonchalantly. She curls her hands up into little sweater paws and wipes carefully under Harry's eyes, and he nods like that answered his question perfectly. Kids these days, honestly.

"Well, this is really fun," he tells her, raising his eyebrows, “ _and_ helpful!”

He tries to sound as sincere as he possibly can, but he doesn’t think she falls for it.

**— L —**

Louis pulls into the parking lot of a small, old-fashioned diner to grab a cup of tea while the listener response plays. When he steps through the door, a rush of warm air welcomes him. He undoes the knot in his scarf and slips his gloves into his coat pocket, breathing in the comforting smell of homemade apple pie. The low hum of someone talking on a radio mixes in with Michael Bublé crooning about Christmas through the speakers behind the counter.

Louis steps up towards the counter and waits for the ladies by the coffee machine to notice him. They’re placing bets on what someone looks like, and by the sound of it, they’ve decided that the guy in question is either tall with a cute butt or he hasn’t bathed in weeks.

“Shut _up_ , Sarah,” the blonde lady hisses at whatever wisecrack the other girl’s just made. She notices Louis standing by the cash register and smiles at him. “Hi, honey, what'll it be?”

“Tea with the bag out, please,” Louis tells her. He looks around the diner while he digs in the pockets of his dress pants for his wallet. There are only three or four other customers seated at the tables, and a man in a red tassel hat is flipping through a newspaper on one of the stools at the end of the counter. It must be a slow night.

“You know,” she says to Sarah as she turns to grab a Styrofoam to-go cup for Louis’ tea, “maybe I’ll just head on out to Seattle and give him my own present for New Year’s Eve."

Louis had been admiring the strings of fairy lights and mistletoe that someone had strung up tastefully over the windows lining the opposite wall, but at the mention of Seattle, he can’t help but look up and stare at them.

“Yeah, alright,” the one called Sarah retorts sarcastically, rolling her eyes. “You go on over there if you want to, but promise me you won't look in his refrigerator.”

She must notice the look of blatant confusion on Louis’ face, because she leans towards him and includes him in their conversation. “Do you cover anything when you put it in the fridge?” she asks, looking genuinely interested to hear what he has to say. “My man never does. He must think there’s a plastic wrap fairy, or something, I swear.”

“I prefer to just let it sit in there until it grows legs and walks out by itself,” Louis grins, and the two women laugh. He hands the blonde girl a five dollar bill in exchange for his cup of tea.

“Let’s take one last caller before we get back to Sleepless,” the voice on the diner radio is saying, and Louis recognizes it as Dr. Viviane Wilde’s voice at the same time the women do. Sarah reaches to turn up the volume, and the blonde girl chews on her fingernails.

“I would just like to know where I could get this man’s address…” a woman with a thick Southern accent says, and the three of them can’t help but scoff. He shares an amused glance with Sarah as the blonde crosses her arms in front of her chest.

"Merry Christmas!" he says to them, dropping his change into the tip jar.

“Merry Christmas, honey,” Sarah calls. She waves as he makes his way back out to his car, watching him with a shimmer in her eyes.

Thankfully, the listener must’ve been debriefed on personal privacy (and hopefully given a restraining order), because when Louis sticks his key in the ignition and starts up the engine again, Harry is back on the air.

“Can I ask you just one more thing?” Dr. Wilde is asking. Harry hums as if to say, go ahead. “People who fell in love once are extremely likely to love again.” Louis gets the feeling that she’s very carefully considering how to phrase her next sentence. “Do you think there might someone out there who you could love as much as your wife?"

There’s a long pause, and Louis swallows hard as he turns back onto the interstate.

“Well, Dr. Viviane Wilde, I… That’s hard to imagine,” Harry’s deep voice says quietly. “I don’t even think I’m ready to look for anyone right now, to be honest."

"But if you were, hypothetically," Dr. Wilde jumps at the chance to make every single person tuned in to fall more in love with Harry than they already have throughout this entire broadcast, "what would you be looking for?"

"I guess just someone who's nice, you know? Someone you can hold a conversation with."

Dr. Wilde laughs, but not unkindly. "I find it interesting that you didn't mention looks," she says.

Harry pauses before he answers. "I mean, if they have a nice smile then that's a plus, but it's not that important. It's really what's on the inside that counts."

Louis swears he can hear millions of people all across the country collectively swooning at that. He bets Dr. Wilde is looking pretty smug right about now.

"Like I said, though, I'm not..." he takes a deep breath, and Louis swallows the lump in his throat. "I mean, I'd be willing to try and find love again someday. I just don't know if now is the right time, you know? I’ve got enough on my plate as it is, trying to handle this little demon.”

His voice catches on the last sentence, but Louis hears a sound that makes him think Harry’s smacking a kiss onto Gracie’s forehead, if her faint cries of, “ _Daaad_! Not my _face_ , yuck!” are anything to go by.

"I can understand that," Dr. Wilde reassures him once their civil war has resolved. "Actively looking for someone and keeping your options open are two different things. You'll know when you find them. You believe in love at first sight, don’t you?"

“I think, for me, it’s always been more about _infatuation_ at first sight than anything else. Sometimes I’ll meet people and I’ll find myself sitting and admiring what they’re like, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m in love with them instantly, you know?”

Dr. Wilde hums thoughtfully.

“I've always been a believer in true love and soulmates and the red string of fate, but I never thought I could say I’d fall in love at first sight. And then, when I met—when I met Lizzie, I—”

“Harry,” Dr. Wilde interrupts him gently, to save him the embarrassment of fumbling for words. “Tell me what was so special about your wife.”

He takes a deep breath, air audibly sticking to the inside of his throat like he's fighting back tears, and then he’s laughing wetly as he says, "I don't know if I can say that on radio."

In the back of his mind, Louis wonders if Aiden’s ever spoken about him the way Harry talks about his wife.

There’s silence for a few seconds, and when Harry laughs again, it should be a happy sound, but instead there's so much pain behind it that it makes Louis' breath hitch and his throat close up.

“It was just a million little things," Harry whispers, so softly that it becomes almost indecipherable through the static buzzing faintly through the speakers in the car radio, "that when you added them all up, they just meant that we were made for each other—like the way her hair always fell into her eyes, or how every time she discovered a new song she liked, she’d play it on repeat for a month.”

Louis gets lost in the smooth rise and fall of his speech, in the way he draws out his vowels. Harry’s words are filling up his mind like a smoke machine, and Louis can’t even breathe anymore. He guides his car along the curve of the highway, driving underneath an overpass, and shadows melt through the windows of his car, casting everything in a blend of moonlight and darkness.

Just for a moment, it feels like if Louis turned his head to the side, he would see Harry folded up in the passenger seat beside him.

"And I knew it the very first time I touched her.” The sound of Harry’s voice is so quiet, so intimate, that it makes Louis want to drive his car right into the barricade on the side of the highway. "I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car on a snowy Tuesday night in November, and when she looked up, I just _knew_ it. It was like…”

Louis’ heart freezes in his chest before fluttering helplessly, vulnerably, because he knows what Harry’s going to say.

He takes a shaky breath and whispers, at the exact same time as Harry does, " _Magic_.”

**—**

Louis steps into the conference room, an empty coffee mug in one hand and his manila folder full of article clippings and story outlines in the other. Immediately, he feels another headache coming on, because Tom fucking Parker is whining about some mean old man who apparently sells the best soup in all of America.

Maybe Louis is biased, since he despises Tom with all of his heart and soul and would find great pleasure in watching him fall off a cliff, but he thinks Tom needs new priorities.

"I see we're wasting time already," Louis mutters as he sets his folder down in front of his chair and heads over to the buffet table in the corner of the room. He bypasses the coffee maker, like usual, and sets his mug down in front of the hot water dispenser.

"Nice to see you too, Tomlinson," Tom greets him, sarcasm dripping from his voice.

It's safe to say the hatred is mutual.

Basically, on top of his hangover and all-around loathing of Tom Parker, it's too early in the morning for him to be expected to deal with his annoying voice in a civilized manner. Unfortunately, Louis' prayers for Tom to mysteriously go missing overnight still haven't been answered yet, but he'll keep his fingers crossed.

Ed's winter blowout party that he always holds the day before New Year’s Eve did not disappoint this time around, and Louis is still feeling the effects of it, combined with the actual New Year’s party they went to. He'd had about six too many shots of tequila and vaguely remembers Aiden convincing him to go up and do a karaoke rendition of Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, which may or may not have ended up becoming a duet with Ed's best friend from college, James Corden, but he’s not entirely sure. Without a doubt, there'll be a video sent around in a few days.

Louis notices Tom glaring at him out of the corner of his eye, and he smirks as he picks through an assortment of cheap tea bags. If he feels like shit, then his office rival sure as hell won't be skipping through a sunny pasture either. That's just how it works, thank you very much.

Zayn, ever the wiser and Louis' personal savior, jumps to change the subject before Louis can criticize Tom's choice in clothing today. (A garish Christmas sweater, _really_? The fact that it's a turtleneck and nearly two weeks after Christmas makes it equally vomit-inducing.)

"Listen to this," Zayn says as he smooths out the wrinkles in the folded copy of The Chicago Sun-Times he's holding. "Phone service in the greater Chicago area was tied up for three and a half hours on Christmas Eve," he summarizes, "when a kid called a phone-in radio show and said that her dad needs a new spouse. Turns out the guy’s a complete catch, and everybody’s in love with him."

Louis' grip tightens on the handle of his mug, and he nearly spills scalding hot water all over his hands in his haste to turn around.

"Three thousand women called the station to ask for his phone number the next day," Zayn finishes, pretending not to notice Louis' reaction. However, the bane to Louis' existence whose name rhymes with _bomb_ does notice, and raises an eyebrow at him.

Zayn sets the paper down on the table and looks up at the rest of them with his fingers steepled. "So, boys, what do we think? Is it article worthy?"

"I heard about that," Louis says, trying to sound indifferent. "This little girl called up and said her dad’s been a mess and hadn’t slept right since her mother died, and she was asking for advice on how to talk to him about it when the shrinkette practically _forced_ the guy onto the phone—”

"Jesus," Tom grumbles under his breath.

"—and all of a sudden," he pauses for dramatic effect as he makes his way back to his corner of the tiny conference table, idly twisting the string of his tea bag around his finger, "he starts talking about how much he misses her, and how he just fell in love with her out of the blue. Love at first sight!” He snaps his fingers. “It’s apparently a very real thing, I’ll have you know. He made it sound like..."

For the life of him, he can't think of a fitting analogy. He’d overheard a conversation in the elevator this morning between two girls who write for the relationship advice section of the newspaper; they’d compared it to a story on 60 Minutes about cows suddenly getting zapped by stray voltage in Michigan, but he doesn’t think that’d really make the most enticing news headline.

**Moo! This Dreamboat from Seattle has a Shocking Love Story**

Yeah, no. Louis is pretty confident on his ability to come up with clever puns and plays on words, but if anyone thinks he has an endless bank of knowledge on cattle and their electrical conductivity, they'd be sadly mistaken.

He gives up on trying to think of a creative metaphor, and ultimately just shrugs his shoulders as he sits back down in his chair. “I don’t know what it sounded like,” he admits, “but it was definitely inspiring.”

"You should write a piece on this, Tommo," Zayn says to him.

"On what?" Louis asks, even though he knows exactly what Zayn's talking about.

“About the insomniac from Seattle, or whatever it is.”

"I'll tell you what it is," Tom interjects snidely as he incessantly clicks his pen, which does absolutely nothing to ebb Louis' growing migraine. "Three thousand women calling a radio station for a random schmuck’s number? There are a _lot_ of desperate women out there." He smirks when he notices Louis glaring at him. "Did you know it's easier to get killed by a terrorist than it is to get married over the age of forty?"

“That is not true,” Zayn says with a roll of his eyes, “that statistic is not true."

"That's right, it isn't true," Louis pipes up.

“But it feels true!” a woman who works in marketing calls as she passes their open door in the direction of the photo copier machine.

"It _feels_ true because it _is_ true!” Tom retorts stubbornly.

"There's practically a whole book that proves that statistic to be false," Louis tells him, having had enough. Let him repeat, it's way too early in the morning for him to be forced to deal with Tom Parker. _Any_ time of day is too early to deal with Tom Parker.

"Calm down, you're the one who brought it up," Tom raises his hands up in his defense, still clicking his pen like he's a contestant on Jeopardy trying to be the first one to buzz in. Louis would really appreciate it if Tom suddenly got whooping cough and choked to death on his own spit.

**—**

"Are you going to tell me what that was all about, then?"

"What what was all about?" Louis asks, feigning innocence and kicking at a rock off the sidewalk before watching it skip away into a rain gutter.

Zayn stops walking. "What's with you lately?" he asks, scrutinizing Louis like he's Sherlock Holmes holding up a magnifying glass, looking for a clue to a mystery. "Did something happen with Aiden?"

"Everything's fine with Aiden," Louis assures him. "Believe me, if it wasn't, you'd be the first one to know."

That seems to placate Zayn for long enough that they get across the street from the deli before he repeats, "No, something's definitely with you. I can feel it."

"What, is my aura flickering?" Louis laughs, before he realizes that Zayn is actually serious. "Wait, what are you trying to say? Do you think something's wrong with me?" he asks, pretending to be worried. "Am I starting to go bald? Am I getting skin cancer? Do I only have a week left to live before I suddenly drop dead?"

"Don’t I wish," Zayn rolls his eyes. He's still looking at him weirdly when they reach the deli, in the same way he’s always done when Louis has refused to tell him something. Louis ignores it for as long as he can, and when he's literally two seconds away from caving in and telling him, Zayn suddenly yells, "Oh my god!" like he knows something Louis doesn't.

Louis narrows his eyes, too preoccupied with trying to keep a straight face to care about the people who are all standing in line, staring at them. He doesn't like the way Zayn's smirking at him.

"It's that guy who was on the radio show, isn't it? The one you're gonna write the article about?"

Louis sighs, defeated. He crosses his arms over his chest and leans back against the wall, resolutely staring at the baked goods displayed under the counter and refusing to say anything.

"It is!" Zayn cries triumphantly. "I _knew_ you were still stuck on that Sleepless in Seattle guy."

Louis purses his lips as a waitress grabs two menus and beckons for them to follow behind her as she leads them through the maze of tables. "His name is Harry, actually."

"Harry, actually?" Zayn’s lips quirk, and Louis’ grip on his menu tightens in annoyance. “Is his favorite movie Love, Actually?”

“Ha ha ha,” Louis grits out, adding on a vaguely threatening, “You’re a fucking dick,” as they slide into opposite sides of the booth. Their waitress shoots them an amused smile and says she’ll be back shortly for their drink orders.

“I’ll stop being a dick when you admit you’re pining over him,” Zayn says. Louis opens his menu and stays quiet. “Why’s he called Sleepless, anyway?”

Louis sighs. "The woman on the radio show nicknamed him that because apparently he hasn't slept well since his wife died."

"And now two thousand women want his number," Zayn concludes bluntly while he slides his jacket off his shoulders.

"He could be a crackhead, you know," Louis says absentmindedly. He trails his fingertips over the row of sugar packets.

"Or an ax murderer… Or a serial killer!” Zayn adds to the list.

"Exactly!" Louis looks up from his menu and smiles at him. "See, you get me."

“Like a disease,” Zayn nods, pretending to be forlorn. Louis kicks him under the table.

They pause their conversation as their waitress comes back over to take their drink orders, a Dr. Pepper for Louis and a ginger ale for Zayn. When she leaves again, Zayn resumes watching him intently with that same creepy expression again. Louis ignores him and sets about folding his napkin into an origami bird. It's just another one of Louis' useless talents, origami. Like his ability to tie his shoes with his eyes shut or how he can guess the bonus puzzles in Wheel of Fortune with only three letters on the board.

"You know," Louis says a few minutes later, trying to feign indifference as he tucks into his soup. "He actually sounded kind of nice."

Zayn—who had been in the middle of a passionate rant about why he hates the entire Advertising team at the office—freezes, his mouth hanging open and his sandwich dangling in midair from where he’d been angrily waving it around to emphasize his point.

His smirk returns full force. "Oh, _reeeally_?" he humors him, leaning towards Louis and putting his elbows on the table like they're in high school, gossiping about their crushes. "Now we're talking!”

Louis scowls and whacks at the back of his hand with his spoon.

“Wait—wait!" Zayn protests, laughing as he finishes chewing his mouthful of pastrami. "Let me recalculate." He pretends to count off on his fingers, and Louis knows exactly what he’s about to say. "Two thousand women are in love with this guy, plus one lonely little man in a sandwich shop."

Louis scoffs at him. "Please," he denies as he scoops up a bit of matzah ball with his spoon. "I'm madly in love with Aiden.” If Zayn slumps back against the booth seat and frowns, Louis pretends not to notice. “Did I tell you about that thing he said to me the other night at Ed's party? Hang on, what was it... Oh!" Louis exclaims as the memory materializes in his mind. "He offered to take me to New York City on Valentine's Day!"

Zayn takes a sip of his ginger ale and doesn't say anything, making it pretty clear that Louis will have to carry on by himself for the time being.

“So, you know, I said yes. _Duh_.”

Zayn still remains silent, his eyes set on where his fingers are picking at the stray pieces of lettuce sticking out of his sandwich.

“I was thinking we could go ice skating in Central Park,” Louis continues, oblivious. “Maybe stop by Rockefeller Center, or see an opera at the Met. Or the Guggenheim! Aiden loves contemporary art."

Zayn looks up from his hands. "Don't forget about the Empire State Building."

"Right, yes. I'll add that to the list," Louis says. "Have you ever been?"

"To New York?” When Louis nods in confirmation, Zayn sighs. “No, I haven’t,” he says, harshly spearing a tomato in his salad with his fork.

If Louis didn't know any better, he'd think he stabbed at it a little more aggressively than normal, but then again, is there even a normal amount of hostility one should use when eating vegetables?

Louis wouldn't know, to be honest. He's not really a vegetable kind of guy.

**— H —**

_“Twenty, nineteen, eighteen…”_

Harry blinks his eyes open as the collective voices of a million people pluck him gently out of his dream. He must've drifted off to sleep while the car insurance commercials were playing. It takes a few seconds of squinting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, the lights from the tv sucking the color out of the living room and washing everything in a pale blue light.

Harry rubs at the corner of his mouth and cranes his neck to look over the mountain of blankets at Gracie, where she’s curled up like a little pill bug on the other end of the couch. She looks so comfortable, so content, swathed in the quilt Harry’s mother made for her second birthday, but if there's one thing he knows for certain, it's that if he doesn't wake her up to see the countdown clock switch over to 0:00, she'll be mad at him for days.

_"Ten, nine, eight, seven..."_

With one clean swoop of the camera, the famous crystal ball in Times Square is captured, glittering and flashing red and blue. The excited roar of the crowd gathered below it grows increasingly louder as the new year approaches.

"Gray,” Harry whispers as he nudges her side with one of his socked feet. "Hey, wake up. The ball's about to drop."

Gracie blinks awake just as the crowd in Times Square reaches the end of the countdown, shouting in unison:

_"Three, two, one. Happy New Year!"_

She smiles up at Harry for a moment, all tiny white teeth and sleepy green eyes. She balls up her fists into tiny bear paws as she yawns, before exhaustion takes over and she slumps back down into the couch cushions, falling fast asleep.

Harry laughs quietly, admiring the way the light from the tv is playing across her face and the arms of her cat pajamas. She just looks so angelic with her long eyelashes resting against the tops of her cheeks and her bowed lips curved up into a content smile. It takes Harry's breath away, how soft she looks, how peaceful and serene.

He nudges her into his lap, tucking his hand under her the backs of her knees and resting her head in the fold of his arm, and stands up slowly so as not to jostle her sleep-limp body. He glances at the tv as he passes it, smiling when he sees the different couples sharing their first kisses of the new year. The opening bars of _New York, New York_ start playing as Harry makes his way across the living room towards the stairs.

_“Start spreading the news, I’m leaving today…”_

In the dimly lit hallway upstairs, the moonlight is shining through the windows and leaking out onto the floorboards in puddles of silver water. It casts stripes of shadows through the slats in the parapet along the tops of the stairs and makes everything look like a sugar-dusted dream.

Harry carefully transfers Gracie's weight into one arm while he eases open her bedroom door, stepping around the stray Lego sets and Uno cards littering Gracie’s floor. When the tops of Harry’s thighs hit the edge of her bed, he leans over and detaches Gracie’s arms from around his neck, laying her down on her bed as gently as he can. She shuffles around a little while he pulls her comforter up to her chin. It's pale purple and covered in monkeys swinging from palm trees, decorated with bananas and coconuts and little smiling toucans wearing fancy sunglasses. Harry thinks, if he’s being honest, he might love it more than Gracie does.

"Happy new year," Gracie mumbles, reaching out for his hand with her eyes still closed. She misjudges the space between them and nearly smacks him in the face.

"Happy new year, baby," Harry says, smiling around a laugh as he smooths her curls back from her face and kisses her forehead. He grabs the tiger stuffed animal that's lounging by Gracie's pillow and places it in her arms, folding her hands over it in a hug.

"Kiss Hobbes," Gracie says through sleep-slack lips, holding the tiger out to him.

"Goodnight, Hobbes." Harry kisses him on the nose, and then kisses Gracie's forehead again for good measure. "Goodnight, Gray."

"G'night, Daddy," he hears Gracie whisper as he's shutting her door, leaving it so it's barely cracked open and some of the hall lights spill into her room.

He turns on the nightlight across the hall as he passes it on his way back downstairs. It's made from colored glass in the shape of a nightingale taking flight, and when its lightbulb flickers to life, it makes waves of blue and purple light seep out all over the floor.

Downstairs, everything is dark and quiet. The overly-cheery NBC hosts on the tv are talking about their 2016 bucket lists, their voices blurring together to create a gentle hum of white noise.

All Harry can hear clearly over Frank Sinatra crooning, _“it’s up to you, New York, New York…”_ is the soft sound of his socks hitting the floor as he walks across the carpet. He watches as the camera on the tv pans over the hundreds of thousands of people all packed tightly together like sardines, celebrating the new year amidst clouds of silver glitter and flashing lights.

With a tired sigh, he flicks the tv off and runs a hand over his face. Silence floods over the room like the tide, deafening and leaving Harry feeling oddly empty. Just as he's about to flick the lamp off and head upstairs to get ready for bed, something glints, catching in the corner of his eye. He looks up and through the blinds covering the living room windows to where there are lights reflecting off the water of the marina outside. The distant fizzling of fireworks reaches his ears, and when Harry steps out onto the deck, the sound gets louder, like he was underwater and he’s just broken the surface. The nostalgia hits him, and goosebumps break out all over his arms.

He looks out across the water to the fireworks being set off on the other side of the harbor. They light up the sky in purples and reds and blues, crackling brilliantly like the embers of a bonfire before they fizzle out. Harry ignores the biting breeze made by the water lapping at the bellies of the boats lined up along the docks, and rests his elbows on the railing of the deck. He watches the fireworks, staring almost unseeingly at the way they're reflected in the water and the windowpanes of the houses along the shoreline.

His mind is suddenly clouded by thoughts of Lizzie on her last New Year's Eve. She'd known it was going to be her last, because the worst thing about cancer is that it makes you uncomfortably aware of exactly how much time you have left until it reaches the end of its road. He can still feel the ghost of her hand in his, its weight warm and reassuring, pressed against his palm. He can still remember watching her as she'd looked up at the sky, fireworks reflected in her eyes as she marveled at the way the stars were sparkling in the night.

It had looked as if the sky had been dipped in glitter.

He doesn't know how long he stands there, just watching. It's not until his fingers go numb and he can't feel his face anymore and he's shivering almost violently that he finally blinks out of his daze. He wraps his arms around himself as he makes his way back inside.

Just before he lets the door slip shut behind him, he looks over his shoulder and up at the stars one last time. He tilts his face up to the moon, closes his eyes, and pictures the way Lizzie would hold up a glass of white wine and make a toast, the same toast she made every year.

"Here's to us,” he whispers, before his vision becomes flooded with tears.

It echoes in his mind long after he's closed the door behind him and gone upstairs to bed.

Here's to them.

**—**

All Harry did was run to the supermarket to pick up some cereal. He was only gone for just over fifteen minutes, but apparently the U.S. postal service is now powered by jet packs or time travel or _something_ , because by the time he gets back to the house, the mailman is back yet again.

Harry groans internally, pulling at the collar of his jacket in a poor attempt to avoid some of the rain. He ducks under the cover of the roof’s overhang, sighing as the mailman smiles at him apologetically. He's holding out a stack of what must be at least a hundred letters, and when Harry looks down at Gracie, he sees she's clutching at least fifty more in her arms, her little yellow rain hat tilted precariously on top of her head.

"They're all for you, Dad!" she cheers, sounding over the moon at the prospects of opening more letters. “You officially have your own fan club!”

Harry takes the stack of envelopes from the man, his arms nearly giving out under the unexpected weight. Every single one of them is addressed the same way. "Sleepless in Seattle, care of Dr. Viviane Wilde," Harry reads out loud. It sounds more like a question than a statement.

"You know," the mailman says hesitantly, like he’s afraid Harry will turn on him at any moment and yell at him. “If you're having trouble sleeping, you should try drinking water from the other side of the glass. I heard it helps."

"I thought that was how you got rid of hiccups," Gracie says, furrowing her eyebrows and looking up at him in confusion.

"Does it work for hiccups?" he asks her.

“Yeah!” Gracie grins at him, “and if you swirl baking soda around in your mouth with some water, it gets rid of the bumps on your tongue!”

Harry normally doesn't mind Gracie's ability to hold a conversation with literally anyone, but right now his arms are going numb from the awkward angle at which he’s holding them, wrapped haphazardly around his mountain of fan mail. He waves to the mailman as he and Gracie head back inside, their rain boots squeaking against the floor and leaving watery footprints in their wake. Harry prays that he still has that old mop lying around somewhere.

"Gracie," Harry says as he tries to balance on one foot and take his boot off with his free hand. He eventually gives up when he nearly slips and falls flat on the floor, kicking the toe of his boot against the wall in frustration. "How did these people get our address?"

"They called and asked for it," she explains, shrugging like giving your address out to a random stranger on the phone is a perfectly safe and reasonable thing to do. She steps out of her ladybug rain boots with an ease that Harry's jealous of and makes her way over to one of the stools by the kitchen counter. She opens the envelope on the top of her stack and unfolds it ceremoniously.

"Dear Sleepless in Seattle," she reads out dramatically, her voice raising as Harry tries to stop her. “You’re the most attractive man I ever laid ears on." She wrinkles her face up in disgust, making a buzzer noise and tossing it over her shoulder in the direction of the trash can. "Even _I_ could come up with a better one-liner than that."

Harry, finally boot free, dumps the letters he'd been holding onto the counter next to her. "Wait, let me get this straight. _They_ called?" Gracie nods at him distractedly, chewing her thumbnail as she skims the next letter. "Who’s _they?_ And how did they get our phone number? Oh, wait—” Harry stops to hit himself in the head, “silly me." He opens the fridge to pull out a pan of leftover mac and cheese for dinner and puts as much disapproval into the look he gives her as he can muster. “You gave it to them, didn’t you?"

Gracie rolls her eyes at him. "If you don't give them your number, they won't let you on the air." She picks up a new letter and recites, "Dear Sleepless in Seattle, I live in Topeka, and I—" She stops, looking up at him to ask, "where's that?"

"It's in Kansas," Harry tells her as he takes the layer of plastic wrap off of the Tupperware container. When her expression remains blank, he says, "Do you even know where Kansas is?"

"It’s, uh. Heck if I know. Somewhere in the middle?"

Harry sighs. "I'm not even going to think about what they're not teaching you in that school of yours, okay?" He turns around and cocks his hip out, pointing with a wooden spoon to the big rectangular state in the middle of United States map that's hanging on the wall.

Gracie taps her temple like she's stored that information away to—well, whatever part of her brain stores the information.

Hey, there's a reason Harry got a C- in Human Anatomy.

"You know what?" Harry says as a thought pops into his head. "Let's just rule out anyone who doesn't live near here, alright?"

"She says she's willing to buy a plane ticket,” Gracie reasons.

Harry sighs, but humors her anyway. He plucks the letter out of her hands, takes one look at the photo paper clipped to the top of the paper, and does a double take. "She looks exactly like my second grade teacher!"

"The one you hated?" Gracie asks.

"The one I hated," Harry confirms with a conclusive nod of his head as he tosses the letter into the open trashcan. “Mrs. Abernathy was a demon sent from the bowels of Hell to ruin my life.”

"Are you even going to read any of these?" Gracie pouts, looking at all of the envelopes spread out around them. It looks like a plus-sized version of Go Fish. "We could open them at random until we find one that looks good."

"Nope." Harry sets the pan of mac and cheese in the oven to warm up and wipes his hands off on a dish towel.

Gracie kicks her socked feet against the kitchen island. "Why not?"

"Because, Gray," Harry says impatiently, "this isn't how it's done. I'd much rather just find someone the way it's supposed to happen, you know? There's a certain set of emotions that come with meeting someone for the first time that are lost when you're introduced through a piece of paper. It's not the same."

Gracie studies him for a moment. "What will you do when you actually meet someone?"

"Well, first, I'll get my magic carpet out," Harry starts, preparing up a grand retelling of Aladdin, but then when Gracie scowls at him he actually pauses to think about it. "I should probably get to know them a little before I ask them out for a drink, right?"

"Or a slice of pizza," Gracie adds, but Harry shakes his head.

"I would avoid asking them out to eat, and here's why," he says, and Gracie sets her chin on top of her steepled fingertips the same way she always does when she's settling in for one of Harry's long-winded stories.

"Halfway through dinner, you could realize they're different from who you thought they were. Maybe they act weirdly in low-light settings, or turn shady in fine dining establishments. Hey!" Harry protests when Gracie gives him a look. "It's happened to me before, and I was seriously sorry I asked them out to dinner on the first date."

Gracie laughs, and Harry continues. "But if it had been just a drink, I'd've realized they weren't right for me, and I could've just said 'thank you' and gone home. No strings attached, no baggage, just a drink between two people who aren't meant to be anything more than friends. See what I mean?"

"Sort of," Gracie shrugs. She looks slightly confused, but luckily she drops the topic.

It's not until it's nearly her bedtime and they're upstairs in the bathroom brushing their teeth that she brings it up again.

“Are you going to marry a woman?”

Harry, who has foam dripping down his chin, glances at her in the mirror. “Maybe I’ll marry a man.”

“Don’t go with a man!” Gracie protests, looking outraged. “You’re going to make me stay an only child for the rest of my life?”

“One, there’s this amazing thing called a-dop-tion,” Harry drones, hitting her in the forehead with the toothpaste tube, “and two, what’s so bad about men?”

“Nothing, I guess,” she puffs her lips out and crosses her arms over her chest. “It’s just, how would that…” She stops in the middle of her sentence and breaks eye contact.

Harry’s confused at her sudden bout of shyness. “What?” he asks her, nudging her with his foot.

Gracie takes a second to compose herself, and then says, all in one breath and so quickly that Harry barely hears all of it, "If you married a guy, would you have sex?"

Harry squawks out a laugh, nearly choking on his toothpaste.

It's safe to say that he and Gracie have a pretty open-book policy when it comes to what they do and don't discuss.

“Well,” he says, considering his options. “I should hope so.”

Gracie rinses off her brush and says conversationally, like she's discussing her latest science project at school, "Would he scratch up your back?"

Harry spits out his mouthful of toothpaste in surprise. "What?" he nearly yells, and Gracie giggles at him.

"In movies, women scratch up the man's back, and stuff." She notices Harry's bewildered expression and clarifies, "Like, when they're having sex."

"And how do you know this?" he asks. If his voice has risen about five octaves in the past minute, he really can’t be blamed.

"The boys at school all talk about it," Gracie says as she steps off of her step stool and lands on the fuzzy mat that covers the bathroom tiles.

"Oh, right, of course. The boys at school talk about it," Harry repeats faintly. Gracie nods affirmatively, and Harry seriously considers looking into homeschooling.

"Get me that towel there, would you?" he asks her, wiping off his face with it when she hands it to him. She reaches out to use it herself, but he catches her by surprise and shoves it in her face, grinning as he messes up her hair and muffles her cries of outrage.

That's what she gets for asking about non-platonic backscratching. His girl is seriously on a whole new level of crazy.

**— L —**

It’s three AM, and Louis can't fall asleep for the life of him.

He's tried reciting the alphabet and counting backwards from one thousand, but nothing’s working. At one point, he even went so far as to try and remember everything he could about European history, the class that bored him to tears in high school, but to no avail. He's wide awake and it doesn't look like he'll slip into the first stage of the REM cycle anytime soon.

He squints until the fuzzy red numbers displayed on the clock on the nightstand come into focus. It's 3:18 AM. Two minutes later than the last time he looked at it. Just fucking great.

Also, the fact that Aiden is snoring louder than a bulldozer is not helping in the slightest. Normally, Louis can tune it out with no problem (he's been sleeping in the same bed as Aiden for almost seven months now, and he’s proud to say he’s a professional), but right now it's dead quiet in their house except for his snores, and the shadows on the ceiling are starting to make Louis a little anxious.

He sighs, lifting his legs out from underneath the blankets to dangle over the edge of the bed. He slips his glasses up the bridge of his nose and pulls his robe tight around himself before tiptoeing across the room and out into the hallway. The stairs must have turned into ice blocks overnight, because Louis' already losing feeling in the bottoms of his feet.

He rounds the corner at the bottom of the stairs and steps into the kitchen, flicking the light on as he passes the switch. There are still forks and spoons left in the sink from dinner, used water glasses, bowls, and plates piled up in a small mountain that should be aggressively tackled with hot water and dish soap, but Louis passes it and makes a mental note to bribe Aiden to do the washing up tomorrow.

Thoughts of a smooth voice and choked up laughter seep into Louis' mind against his control as he aimlessly opens the fridge in search of something to eat. He stares at the rows of fat-free yogurt and pasta leftovers, determined to find at least one thing appetizing, but he knows it’s a useless effort.

He's not hungry—he's restless.

The strange feeling of something lurking behind him swoops low in his stomach and prickles the back of his neck. He spins around, slamming the refrigerator door shut, but the kitchen is empty except for him and the dining room table. The feeling hasn’t gone away, though, so Louis squints and surveys the room slowly.

The last thing his eyes land on is the radio.

He knows for a fact that there are always recaps of Dr. Wilde's show running in the hours when she's not on air…

He sucks in a breath, biting his lip and grabbing a mug and a tea bag from the cabinet over the stove. The tea kettle seems to wink at him as he carries it to the sink to fill it with water, and once he's set it back down on the burner and turned the heat up underneath it, he gives in.

"Welcome back to the best of Dr. Viviane Wilde, clinical psychologist," a man's voice is saying when he presses the button on the radio. The intro is followed by a mix of sound bites from some of the recent callers, and Louis leans back against the wall and pretends he's not waiting for one sound bite in particular as he picks idly at his fingernails.

The moment Harry's voice comes on, Louis' head snaps up so fast his neck nearly breaks in half. So much for pretending.

"For right now, I’m just trying to focus on getting out of bed every morning," Harry says, his voice catching like he's choking on his tears. "Focus on breathing in and out, all day long. And then maybe, after a while, I won’t have to remind myself anymore. Maybe, after a while, I’ll get out of bed and breathe in and out, and it won’t hurt so bad to think about her anymore."

They've rearranged what he said a little, but Louis still feels like his lungs are deflating. His vision blurs and there's a lump sitting heavy in his throat, and in his mind he's back in his car on Christmas Eve, driving through the shadows cast by highway overpasses with tears dripping down his face.

"Harry," Dr. Wilde's soft voice says, “tell me what was so special about your wife.”

A few seconds of staticky silence follow, and then Harry’s quiet laugh echoes in the small kitchen, bouncing off the oven door and rattling around inside Louis' rib cage. "I don't know if I can say that on radio."

Harry exhales shakily, and so does Louis.

“It was just a million little things that when you added them all up, they just meant that we were made for each other. I knew it the very first time I touched her; it was like... coming home. I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car, and I knew it.”

Louis knows what's coming, but it still rips his heart out of his chest when Harry whispers, so heartbroken, so soft, so achingly painful: "It was like magic."

Louis drops his head into his hands and lets the tears pooling in his eyes spill over and drip on the kitchen floor.

**—**

"Zayn, I think I'm going crazy," Louis announces as he takes off his coat.

Zayn, looking extremely calm and effortlessly beautiful as always, is curled up in his usual red armchair with a paperback book propped open in his hands.

"Shhh!" he scolds him, glaring over the top of his book. "This is a library, Louis, in case you've forgotten. There are people here who don't want to hear our conversation. You need to keep your voice down."

Louis ignores him and slumps down into the chair next to him, scooting it closer so that he's nearly pressed up against Zayn's side. "Are you happily married?"

Zayn's forehead wrinkles up in confusion, and Louis would laugh if he hadn't been in a mild state of panic since the second he'd woken up this morning.

(That mild state of panic could’ve been partially attributed to the fact that he’d slept through his alarm and gotten to work half an hour late, but whatever.)

"What?" Zayn whispers, looking around nervously, because Louis is still speaking too loudly for his liking.

"I mean, why did you get married?" Louis rephrases hastily, waving his arms around in frustration. "Was it all butterflies and trumpets and fireworks in your stomach? Did you have an itch under your skin that you couldn’t scratch, no matter what you did to try and stop it?"

Zayn must realize that Louis isn't going to drop this subject until he gets an answer that he's satisfied with, because he marks his page in his book and closes it with a sigh.

"I got married because I found the girl I wanted to spend the rest of my life with," he says, with an undertone that's screaming _you're the biggest idiot I know_.

Well, it is a fair point.

"So, you believe she's the only person for you, then? That in some mystical, universal way it was fated that you'd fall in love?"

"Louis," Zayn starts to say, and then stops and lets his lips move around air while he figures out how to phrase what he's trying to tell him. "Being attracted to someone simply means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously."

Louis lost him about two subconsciouses ago.

Zayn rolls his eyes at Louis’ blank stare. "What I mean is that... fate isn't an actual, scientific thing. Sure, you can believe in fate all you want, but really what it all boils down to is your cells and their cells knowing they're a perfect match. Frankly, I think it's quite romantic—" Zayn stops, obviously realizing he'd started to drift off course, “—hang on, what is this all about, anyway?"

He looks at Louis carefully, eyeing the way he's slumped dejectedly back in his seat, and then his face drops and he's groaning out an, "Oh, _shit_ ," and pressing at his temples with his fingertips. " _Please_ don't tell me you're rethinking everything."

"I hardly even know him!" Louis cries, and thankfully Zayn doesn't tell him to stop yelling again, because his feathers are just as ruffled as Louis' are right now. "All of a sudden, I'm having fantasies about some random man I've never even _met_ , and to make matters worse, he lives in Seattle!"

Zayn presses his lips together, looking like he’s trying incredibly hard to remain indifferent to Louis’ mid-life crisis while also pushing him towards the right path. "Doesn't it rain nine months out of the year in Seattle?"

"Exactly! I do _not_ want to live in Seattle." Louis would stand up and start pacing around if he weren't in the middle of a public place right now. He takes a deep breath, holding it for a few seconds before he exhales. It does absolutely nothing to calm him down.

Mindful of the people doing a pretty bad job of pretending they're not eavesdropping on their conversation, Louis leans closer to Zayn and lowers his voice. "I don't know what to do, Z. I don't want to drop everything, but what I'm really worried about is not taking the chance and always wondering, always knowing I could've done something about it."

Louis glances up at Zayn tentatively, and he's watching him so intently that it shocks him out of whatever this weird trench of self-doubt is.

Zayn opens his mouth to say something, but then Louis is jumping up and out of his chair. "You know what? I've just got cold feet!" Louis says, and Zayn looks like he wants to smack Louis upside the head with his book, but Louis is too busy gesticulating like a bird trying to take flight to notice. "Everybody gets nervous before they get married, right? I mean, didn't you?"

Zayn's shoulders sag. "Um, I guess I might've at some point," he says, sounding exhausted.

Louis points a finger gun at Zayn. "Yes!" he says, grinning and shrugging on his coat. "Thank you, thank you, thank you. It literally feels like a weight has been lifted off of my shoulders." He hugs Zayn with one arm. "Love you, bro. See you tomorrow."

And with that, he turns around and makes his way through the rows of bookshelves and computer tables towards the exit. A woman seated behind the desk by the door is eyeballing him from behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses like he's grown three extra heads. Ah, that must be the librarian. He winks at her as the door slips shut behind him.

**— H —**

"Barbs has a model friend named Cara," Niall is saying as they set off to the pub around the corner during their lunch break. "But it's not like she's taller than you, or anything!" he rushes to say when he misreads Harry's confusion as him being weary of her. "If you wear them boots with the little heels, you should be alright."

Harry blinks at him cluelessly for a second, not understanding how that's a reasonable subject change from their previous discussion about who paints the white lines on the road for the crosswalks, but then he sees the look in Niall's eyes and he gets it.

He's picking up their discussion from earlier about Harry's love life (or lack thereof).

Wonderful. Absolutely thrilling. Harry spots an open pothole in the road and briefly considers jumping into it to escape this conversation.

"No, no no no," Harry groans, holding up his hands. " _No_ ," he adds one more time for good measure. "I'm sure Cara is a lovely person, but no thank you. I'm not asking you to set me up with anyone, okay?"

Niall gives him a look that, frankly, offends him a little. Or a lot. Does he not think Harry can pull? Honestly. Does Harry need to remind him who the top dog was in high school? Or who won the _Most Likely to Become a Popstar_ superlative? Harry did, thank you very fucking much.

"Ni, really. I don't need your help! I can find someone by myself. I was just asking, because..." He waves his hand around in the air while he thinks of how to phrase it, "I want to know what it's like, you know. Out there."

 _Out there_ as in the dating world, which is something Niall is actually very attuned to, funnily enough (considering he’s engaged to his high school sweetheart).

Niall sighs loudly, like Harry's missing the point. "That's what I'm trying to _tell_ you, you fuckin’ idiot. I know what women are looking for." When Harry looks at him questioningly, he explains, "Pecks and a cute butt."

"What?" Harry scrunches his face up in surprise. "You mean, they like, talk about who has the cutest butt? That's an actual _thing_?"

Niall nods, the brim of his baseball cap drooping a little bit lower on his head.

"Why do I feel like I've heard that before?" Harry muses out loud. Maybe it was on the cover of one of those magazines Gracie trades with her friends, the ones that are bright pink and glossy and probably have two page photo spreads of the latest teen heartthrob posing in nothing but tight-fitting underwear.

"Because it's everywhere. It’s infected everyone’s heads," Niall tells him, amused in the easy way he always is. "You can't even turn on the news anymore without hearing about how some babe thought some guy's butt was cute.” Harry honks out a laugh, and Niall grins at him. "I'm being serious! You really gotta wonder how these trends start. Like, who was the first woman to mention butts, and how did it spread like wildfire?"

Harry hums, mulling it over, and they walk in a comfortable silence for a minute.

"So, how's my butt?" he asks, curious despite the fact that he'd looked at it in the mirror one day last week and liked what he saw. He'd just appreciate a second opinion for the sake of comparison.

Niall stops him with a hand on his shoulder and gestures for him to turn around. Harry barely contains his laughter and does as he's told, nearly losing it when Niall lifts up the back of his jacket and hums while he thinks about it. "Not bad," he concludes after a moment's deliberation, patting Harry's butt once before letting go of his jacket and straightening back up again.

"Really?" Harry preens. Niall fist bumps him as they continue down the street. "Is it cute, though?"

"Hmm," Niall considers it. "I don't know. Are we grading on the curve?"

—

Ten minutes later, they've snagged two seats at the counter of the restaurant and (will the wonders never cease) are back on the topic of Harry's relationship status.

"When's the last time you were," Niall leans in and lowers his voice, "out there?"

Harry digs through the depths of his memory for the last time he'd been on a date that wasn't him tagging along with Niall and Barbara or Liam and Sophia and being the awkward third wheel who would use the excuse of getting a soda refill or having to take a piss to give them some alone time.

He comes up blank, since he clearly hasn’t dated since Lizzie. Niall smiles at him, and instead of pity like Harry would expect, his eyes are full of understanding.

See, this is why they've been best friends since elementary school.

"Okay, let's start somewhere else then. You've got to be courteous, right?" Harry nods, and Niall continues. "You hold the door for them, split the check on the first date—"

"Wait," Harry interrupts, sticking his bottom lip out pensively. "I don't think I'd want to go out to eat on the first date. I was explaining this to Gracie the other night, actually—” he resolutely ignores Niall’s _oh, here we go_. “It's like, you ask them out for a drink instead so that if it goes horribly wrong, you can escape without having to be stuck sitting through a three course meal."

Niall balks at him. "But the quickest way to someone's heart is through their stomach, Haz, not their liver!"

"I think you mean the quickest way to _your_ heart," Harry mutters, eyeing the way Niall is devouring his burger. Niall gives him a pointed look, and Harry gets back on subject. "Fine, okay. Say we go out to eat. I don't know, I just don't think I could let them pay for it. Wouldn't it be more courteous of me to cover it and have us split the check on the next date?"

"Holy fuck, look!" Niall yells, turning around and leaning exaggeratedly to the left to get a look at the windows covering the far wall of the restaurant. "There's a fucking parade going by in your honor!" He turns back around, grinning at Harry, who isn't nearly as amused. "Guess who's gonna be Man of the Year in _Seattle Magazine_? You're looking right at him, folks! Mr. Harry Styles!"

Harry rolls his eyes as Niall starts applauding. He pokes at the bread on his turkey and avocado sandwich absentmindedly as he watches Niall take a gulp of his beer.

Suddenly, Niall's sitting up straight in his chair and wiping his mouth off with the back of his hand. "You know what tiramisu is, right?"

"No, Niall," Harry deadpans, dimpling when Niall frowns at him. "I have absolutely no clue what tiramisu is. It's not like I used to be a baker, or anything."

"Shut up. Literally, just shut up." Niall waves his hand like he's swatting at a fly. "I've heard that line about fifty million times; you don't need to keep saying it."

Harry makes a face at him and thanks their waitress when she comes over to refill his glass of cherry coke. When he looks up, Niall's studying him intently.

"I think you need to step up your game," he says, talking over Harry when he goes to protest the fact that he is _very skilled_ in pulling dates, thank you. "If the only card trick you can whip out of your deck is paying for the meal, then you won't get past date three if you're lucky."

"I guess you're right," Harry sighs. "This is going to be tougher than I thought." He takes a sip of his soda and holds it in his mouth until the bubbles start to sting his tongue.

"Hey!" Niall nudges Harry in the arm, nearly knocking his glass to the floor. "What about that decorator that was helping out on the Winston project? The one with the quiff gelled up a mile high?"

There's only one person Harry knows who could fit that description.

"You mean Nick Grimshaw?"

Niall nods, gesturing at him with his knife. "Yeah, he's your type, isn't he? Tall, loud, has an eye for fashion and a weird affinity for overpriced restaurants with small portions. You two would make the perfect couple."

"Oh, uh," Harry mumbles, shaking his head. "I don't know, I mean, I couldn't—"

"You couldn't what?" Niall asks loudly around a mouthful of french fries.

"I'm not really on the same level as he is—"

"What?" Niall squawks again. "What the hell are you talking about? He always eyes you with that sexual predator—but in a good way—look that you're always too oblivious to notice! He's into you, I swear." Niall nods his head affirmatively, and then shrugs. "And if he's not into you, well, then he's a creep and you'll find out the hard way. But that's life, lover boy."

"I don't even know how I'd do that—get him to talk to me," Harry tries to explain, but he knows it's a moot point. Niall's caught him red handed.

"You're literally the biggest dumbass ever," Niall tells him. "There's nothing to do other than just call him up and arouse him with your sexy architect talk. Give him fuel for his wet dreams. Something like, 'hey, come over. Let's look at swatches.'"

"Call him on the phone," Harry repeats slowly, laughter making his voice squeaky, "and say, 'come over, let's look at swatches'?"

"If Nick Grimshaw is anything, it's a sucker for color schemes and deep voices," Niall says, like it's general knowledge.

Harry nods sardonically. "Right, and he wouldn't see right through that and know I'm trying to get in his pants."

"Harry, dear _God_ ," Niall groans, and for a second it almost looks like he's about to face plant into the remains of his lunch in frustration. "You don't have to say it how I said it, you're missing the point. You ask him out using whatever mating ritual you weird leggy hipsters have these days."

Harry is about to protest the fact that he's just been labeled as a weird leggy hipster, but then Niall points to his sandwich.

"I'll bet you five bucks that guacamole in there is organic."

"It is! I read on the menu that the avocados were actually imported from—" Harry starts cheerfully, before he realizes it was a trap. He lets his entire face droop as he pouts, making him look like a basset hound. "I'll have you know that organic guacamole has lots of health benefits!"

"You're literally eating avocados in January," Niall deadpans, giving him a flat look and wrinkling his nose at him.

"Stop looking at me like that!" Harry cries, outraged. He whacks Niall in the face with his napkin. "I happen to like vegetables, thank you very much!"

Niall laughs at him, swatting the napkin away and raising his beer in a toast. "Well, that makes one of us."

—

When Harry gets home from work that night, the house is dead quiet, and if there's anything he's learned since becoming a father eight years ago, it's that a quiet house means something is either seriously wrong or Gracie is hiding somewhere, ready to jump out and scare him half to death. Or she's slipped and brained herself on something and is lying on the floor, knocked unconscious in a puddle of blood.

Harry is a big fan of exactly zero of those possibilities.

"Gracie?" he calls up the stairs as he passes them on his way to drop his briefcase on the table. "Hey, I'm home! What do you want for dinner? I could be persuaded towards a pepperoni pizza if you ask nicely."

Harry strains his ears, listening for any type of response, but he gets nothing. He doesn't even hear the squeak of a floorboard or a giggle from a hidden Gracie. Harry narrows his eyes and tries to keep his panic at bay.

"Gray?" he yells, doing one last scan of the living room and kitchen, double checking all of her usual hiding places. When all of them are empty, he assumes she has to be upstairs. "I'm coming up now, you'd better not be doing anything bad!"

He stomps up the stairs extra loud, but when he gets to Gracie's bedroom, it's empty too.

"What in the world?" Harry mutters to himself, about to turn around and check the bathroom, when suddenly Gracie's bubble chair spins around to face him.

Gracie is sitting in it with a bored looking Jamie Payne lounging beside her.

"Oh," Harry says, bewildered. "Hello, Jamie."

"Howdy," Jamie says, saluting at him with two fingers.

Harry notices the headphones in both of their ears. "What are you listening to? Lil Wayne? ABBA's Greatest Hits?"

Gracie gives him a flat, unamused look. "The Red Hot Chili Peppers," she tells him, and before he can ask what album, she gestures towards the door with a quick wave of her hand, a clear sign that she wants him to leave.

Harry almost laughs at how much she reminds him of a younger version of Gemma. "Alright, well, don't let the party get too crazy. I don't want any noise complaints."

"Can you shut the door on your way out?" The way she says it makes Harry wonder if she’d paid attention to a word he’d said.

"Uh, yeah. Yeah, of course," Harry says eloquently, fumbling behind himself for the doorknob. "Have fun, and all that."

He waves goodbye to Jamie, who raises his eyebrows at him and doesn't wave back. "H.N.G.," he says in the hilariously sassy voice of an eight-year-old.

Harry must look perplexed, because he clarifies with a snooty, "Hi and goodbye?" that makes it seem like Harry’s the one not making any sense here.

With that, they turn the chair back around with synchronized foot movements, and Harry is left to stare at the back of it with a mixture of amusement and confusion.

—

Two hours later, after Harry has driven Jamie home and picked up Gracie’s usual order of one double-stuffed pepperoni pizza with extra garlic sauce and a plain cheese pizza for himself, he’s spinning around in his desk chair in the den and trying to gather up the will to call Nick Grimshaw. He’s had his finger hovering over the phone icon for close to three minutes now, but every time he goes to press it, the nervous butterflies in his stomach make him hesitate.

“Get it together, Styles,” he mutters to himself, before he inhales the biggest breath he possibly can. He holds it until his lungs start to burn, and then he lets it out, and dials.

After five rings, Harry’s started to wonder whether this is all a joke that’s Niall’s playing on him, but then the ringing stops and a voice is saying, “Hello?” and Harry breaks out into a cold sweat.

He clears his throat, and all of the conversation starters he’d been going over while he waited for Nick to answer fly right out of his head. “Hiiiiii,” he says instead, and then squeezes his eyes shut at how badly he wants to slap himself. “This is Harry—I don’t know if you remember me, but, um—”

“Harry, as in Harry Styles?” Nick asks, sounding like he’s smiling.

“Oh,” Harry says, realizing he’d been holding his breath. “Thank God. That would’ve been pretty embarrassing if you hadn’t remembered me.”

“Of course I remember you!” Nick sounds slightly offended. “You’re not a stick in the mud like all those other beer-bellied architects are. So how are you, babe?”

“I’m doing well,” he says, gaining a little bit of confidence now that he knows Nick does, in fact, know who he is, and he does, in fact, seem at least vaguely happy to be speaking to him.

“Well, that’s good to hear,” Nick laughs, and then there’s a pause where Harry doesn’t know if he’s trying to think of something to say or if he’s waiting for Harry to tell him why he’s calling him. When the silence stretches a little too long to be comfortable, Nick asks, “Is everything alright?”

“Oh, yeah!” Harry jumps to reassure him. “Everything’s great. I was just calling because, well,” he bites his lip, “I just wanted to—um, I was wondering if you’d want to—”

“Yes?” Nick sounds amused.

“—if you would like to, maybe, get a drink with me?”

Harry forces himself to breathe normally when it’s been five seconds and Nick still hasn’t said anything. He’s about to hang up and pray that he never has to face Nick again for the rest of his life, but then Nick is exhaling and saying cheekily, “Well, that depends. Are you asking me out to get smoothies, or are you trying to get me drunk?”

“There may be some alcohol involved somewhere along the line,” Harry admits, biting his lip to contain his smile.

“Harry Styles!” Nick gasps, “and here I thought you were an honorable man.”

“ _Heeeey_ , I’m honorable! Merriam and Webster themselves called me up to take my photo for the definition of honorable!”

Nick laughs a throaty laugh. “I think you’d better fact check, sweetheart, but yes, I’d love to get a drink with you. I know the perfect place.”

“Really?” Harry’s chest puffs out like a peacock’s. This is going smoother than he’d hoped.

“I don’t really know if I should disclose that information, because it’s kind of top secret,” Nick says, lowering his voice, “but there’s this little Italian restaurant in Capitol Hill that has an incredible wine selection and lasagna to _die_ for.”

Harry lets his mind work over that one for a few seconds, trying to think of some way to backtrack and clarify that while he does love a good lasagna, he strictly meant drinks as in _drinks_ , not a full sit-down meal, but all he can come up with is a pathetically high-pitched, “Dinner?”

“Yes?” Nick sounds slightly confused. “That is what you had in mind when you asked me out, wasn’t it?”

Harry picks the cheese off his slice of pizza and injects as much enthusiasm into his voice as he can to say, “Dinner would be great!”

After a slightly comical next few minutes, in which Nick draws up a plan for when and where, and Harry sits on the other end of the line nodding and agreeing to everything he offers because he’s incredibly determined to not fuck this up, they decide to meet at the restaurant at 7:30 on Friday night. Nick promises to reserve the best table in the house, because, surprise! Nick has connections with everyone in this god damned city.

Wait until Niall gets a load of _this_.

**—L—**

So, maybe Louis is a little drunk.

It’s just that Zayn honestly has the most well-stocked liquor cabinet in the entire _world_ , and Louis can’t say no when it comes to Rémy Martin Cognac.

Zayn, being the perfect best friend that he is, had simply sighed and stepped to the side to let Louis come in when he’d knocked on his door at 11 o’clock that night, going insane in all definitions of the word and holding a half-written letter to Sleepless in Seattle in his gloved hand. He’d pulled out the glass of Cognac without a word the second he saw the way Louis keeled over and slumped dejectedly at his kitchen table. Louis had thanked him before he poured himself a nearly overflowing glass of brandy. Then, Zayn had given Louis control of the tv remote and gone back into the kitchen to make him some comfort food.

Louis would probably be dead without Zayn, honestly.

The first channel Louis had landed on was the one that plays romance movies all year round. An Affair to Remember was airing (because the world literally _hates_ him), and Louis had spent the next ten minutes sipping his way to thoroughly smashed and crying into the sleeve of his sweater.

“You know what I don’t understand?” Louis asks the tablecloth during the commercial break. “How people can be so sure of themselves when it comes to love. They don’t let anything stand in their way—time, distance, nothing can change their minds, because they’re so certain that they’ve made the right choice, and it’s _real_!” Louis tightens his grip around his glass the more riled up he gets. “They know it’s real, they know it’s meant to be, they know it’s—”

“A movie,” Zayn interrupts him, unimpressed, as he sets a steaming bowl of SpaghettiOs down in front of him.

Louis, having lost his train of thought the second Zayn’s voice had cut in, stares up at him in confusion.

“You know, Lou, I’ve been thinking,” Zayn tells him as he sits down across from him, “and I’ve come to a conclusion.”

“What?” Louis prompts him when it’s clear that Zayn won’t continue unless Louis acknowledges something other than his spoon.

“You don’t want to be in love.”

“What?” Louis asks again, squawking it this time and preparing to defend his honor.

Zayn sighs, and Louis abruptly shuts up.

“You don’t want to be in love,” he repeats slowly. “You want to be in love in a movie. You don’t know what love really is.”

“Oh, and you do?” Louis rolls his eyes, and the movement makes his head spin.

Zayn levels him with a frustrated look. “That’s not what I’m saying. All I’m saying is that you _think_ you know what love is, but you don’t. You fell into this thing with Aiden so fast that you didn’t have a chance to even think about it.”

Louis swirls his spoon around in the tomato sauce and doesn’t say anything. He can feel Zayn’s eyes on him as he eats, and it’s quiet for a few minutes except for the low hum of the tv in the background and the sound of Louis’ sniffling as he cries.

“Read it to me,” Zayn says eventually, gesturing to the letter that’s still clutched in Louis’ hand.

He unfolds the tear-stained letter, glances up at Zayn, and then reads quietly, “Dear Sleepless and Gracie, I have never written a letter like this in my life, but I—”

Zayn wrinkles his nose. “That’s what everyone writes at the beginning of letters to strangers. You’ve got to be original or you won’t stand a chance against all of those girls.”

“I know that,” Louis groans, nearly breaking his pencil in half, “you think I don’t know that?” He takes another sip of brandy and stares up at the ceiling, unseeing. “What the fuck am I doing with my life?” he whispers to himself, which Zayn wisely doesn’t comment on.

“Are you going to tell Aiden about this?”

Louis breaks out of his examination of the water stains on Zayn’s ceiling and blinks at him a few times. “I don’t even know anymore,” he admits, surprising himself in his honesty. “I would give anything to marry him, you know?”

Neither him nor Zayn acknowledges the fact that his voice breaks to nothing more than a whisper.

Louis sits up straighter in his chair in a sudden burst of inspiration. “I should write something in this about magic, shouldn’t I?”

“Magic?” Zayn isn’t following.

Louis throws his hands up in the air. “I need to put something that no one else is going to say. What if this guy is my destiny, and this is the only shot I get at meeting him?”

“You need to make the first move,” Zayn tells him, finally catching onto where Louis is trying to take this. “Don’t just list off all of the reasons why you think you’d be the perfect match, or whatever shit people think is romantic these days. You need to say something that’ll catch his attention.”

Louis spoons some SpaghettiOs into his mouth and thinks as hard as his brain will let him. “Where’s an iconic place?”

“Washington, D.C.?”

“No, too much traffic.”

“The Liberty Bell?”

Louis stares at Zayn. “How romantic. A big metal thing with a crack down the side of it. I’ll win him over for sure.”

“The Empire State Building?”

“No, that’s too—wait.” A smile starts to spread on Louis’ face. “Wait, that could actually work.”

“Sunset on Valentine’s Day,” Zayn says, leaning back in his chair with a grin.

Louis hums his agreement as he scribbles it down on the sheet of paper. “It plans out perfectly. I’m already going to be in New York with Aiden; I could squeeze it in for sure—”

He freezes as it dawns on him.

“I’ll be in New York with _Aiden_.”

With that, he crumples up the letter and throws it across the room.

“Louis!” Zayn protests, pushing his chair back and following after him. They end up on opposite ends of the couch in front of the tv, Louis moodily attacking his food with his spoon and Zayn watching him. “Louis, look at me.”

“Why.” He says it so flatly that it makes Zayn scoot over and take the bowl out of his hands.

“I’m going to tell you something about destiny, and you’re going to listen and stop acting like a child.” He waits until Louis is glaring at him before he continues. “If you hadn’t almost forgotten your presents at your parent’s house, you wouldn’t have made Aiden drive ahead of you, which means you wouldn’t have caught the radio show when you did, which means you wouldn’t have heard about Harry.”

He looks Louis dead in the eye and says, with everything he has in him, “ _That_ is destiny.”

**—H—**

The nightmares are the worst.

It’s the fourth time this week that Harry’s woken up to Gracie screaming for him, in tears and shaking all over, because she’s had another one. The worst part about being a father is the feeling of total helplessness that’s making Harry’s heart pound against his ribcage, because this is something that’s hurting her and he’s helpless to stop it from happening.

“Dad!” she yells again, sounding more anxious than she had just a second before, and Harry leaps out of bed so fast he gets lightheaded. He skids down the hall on his socks and flips the light on, heading towards her bed and pulling her into his arms. Her hair is sticking to her sweaty forehead and her cheeks are wet from her tears.

“It’s okay now, Gray, I’m here,” he whispers to her, cradling the back of her head and running his fingers through her hair. “It’s not real, you’re okay.”

It takes a while, but she stops hyperventilating and calms down enough that he loosens his grip on her. He grabs a tissue from the box beside her bed and wipes her face free of tears.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?” he asks her.

“It was flooding,” she says. She blinks up at him, her bottom lip trembling.

“What was?”

“Our house.” Gracie pulls her blankets up above her nose, hiding from the cold air. Her eyelashes are stuck together in little points, like the rays of the sun, and Harry can’t help but smile at the trust in her eyes, all directed at him. “The water was pouring in through the windows and I was stuck and then I started drowning.”

Tears well up in her eyes again, and Harry’s heart aches, like someone’s attached a string to it and is trying to pull it out of his chest. “Oh, baby, that’s awful,” he whispers, “and you’re so brave for facing it, but it’s over now.”

Gracie smiles sadly at him. “I don’t like nightmares.”

“I don’t either,” Harry assures her. He smooths her hair back from her face and smiles at her, “but you know what makes it better?”

“What?” Her eyes sparkle in the dim light of the room.

“Special pancakes.”

“Special _chocolate chip_ pancakes?” Gracie grins toothily.

Harry sighs, shaking his head even as he laughs. “Well, little miss, I guess that’s all up to the chef.”

Later, when Harry’s pouring pancake batter into a pan and Gracie’s kicking the heels of her feet against the cupboards from her perch on the island counter, Gracie’s quiet voice drifts over the hum of their holiday music playlist and the sizzling from the stove.

“What do you think happens to someone after they die?”

Harry turns to look at her over his shoulder. “I don’t know, Gray,” he says, “but I hope they go somewhere peaceful.”

Gracie looks hopeful. “Like heaven?”

“I don’t know,” he says again. He chews on his lip and rests his elbows on the counter behind him. “I never really thought about it, to be honest, because I can’t really fathom it, you know?” Gracie nods. “I guess I just thought that people’s souls would go one way and their bodies would go the other and that was it. But now…”

Harry sighs, pausing to flip the pancake over. “Now, I think there might be something after, because I have these dreams about—” His voice starts to get thicker and his eyes start to sting and he doesn’t even try to hide it, because Gracie’s eyes are wet too. “—about your mom, and we have long talks about you, and how you’re doing.

“Which she sort of knows, because she’s out there and we’re down here and I know without a doubt that she can see us, so what is that? That’s an afterlife, isn’t it?”

Gracie looks down at her hands. “I’m so scared that I’m going to forget her."

Harry steps across the kitchen and pulls her into a hug.

“Please don’t let me forget her," she whispers over the sound of Harry's heart breaking.

**—**

After Gracie’s eaten her fill of chocolate chip pancakes and Harry’s carried her back up to bed, he goes back downstairs and out onto the deck. It’s cold, but Harry doesn’t mind, since it’s so peaceful, silent save for the lapping of the water against the edge of the marina. The moonlight plays off the ripples on the water's surface like liquid silver.

Harry sings under his breath, faint melodies carried away by the breeze. He leans back against the house and stares up at the stars.

**—L—**

On the other side of the country, Zayn drives Louis home and makes him promise to at least try and get some rest.

“I will,” Louis says. Long after Zayn’s driven away, Louis stays seated on the steps leading up to his apartment. He swears the stars are winking at him.


	2. turn around and run into me

**—H—**

“My mom told me you were gonna pay me for this,” is the first thing Lux says when Harry opens the door.

“Did your mother also tell you that when you do favors for people, you shouldn't expect anything in return?” Harry fires right back at her as he steps aside to let her come in. “Louise always prides herself on her manners, Luxie, did you know that?”

Lux moodily chews on her gum as she kicks off her snow-caked boots. “Don’t call me that,” she says. “That’s not my name.” She ignores the way Harry instantly bursts into song, crossing her arms over her chest and fixing him with her best I’m-seventeen-and-I’m-better-than-you scowl. “And babysitting isn’t a favor, it’s a _job_ , you idiot. It takes a lot of responsibility.”

“That’s why I’ve put my trust in you,” Harry grins cheekily at her as she avoids his attempts to ruffle her hair, “because I know a big girl in her junior year of high school can handle my daughter for three hours.”

Lux scoffs, but Harry can see the smile she’s trying (and failing) to hide. “A lot can happen in three hours,” she says, ticking her list off on her fingers as she goes. “There could be a tornado warning, or the power could cut out, or the tv could explode.”

“I’m pretty confident that the tv _won’t_ explode,” Harry laughs at her as they make their way into the living room. “But if you’re that worried about it, you have my permission to leave it off and play Scrabble instead.”

Lux rolls her eyes like he’s the lamest person on the face of the earth and raises her voice to talk over him. She’s still trying not to laugh, and _see_ , she can’t resist his jokes for long. He’s irresistible.

“What if we decide to have a sword fight and one of our arms gets chopped off?” She grins at Gracie when she turns around to wave at her from her spot on the couch. “Or what if Gracie wants me to make her something and the stove catches on fire?”

“First of all, we don’t have any swords, and second—” Harry narrows his eyes while the two of them high five. “Are you actually trying to get out of making forty bucks?” he asks Lux, and she immediately shuts up and clasps her arms in front of her, fixing him with her prettiest smile.

Gracie hides her giggles behind her hand.

“Mhm. That’s what I thought.”

He excuses himself to grab his coat from upstairs, and when he comes back down it’s to see Lux lounging on the couch with her feet on the coffee table and Gracie looking at him with an excited glint in her eyes.

“Daddy, look what came in the mail today,” she says, waving an envelope around in the air. “It’s from a guy in Baltimore, and he addressed the letter to _both_ of us!” She turns to Lux with a disapproving look on her face. “Most people just put _To Harry_ or _To Sleepless in Seattle_ , and I hate it. Who was the one who called the radio station in the first place?”

Lux looks unsure, but luckily she picks the right answer. “You were?”

“I was, thank you very much.” Gracie nods the affirmative, but Harry’s too busy listing out the emergency numbers for the restaurant, Gracie’s pediatrician, and poison control to listen to them.

“Call me if anything happens, like a tornado or a power outage.” He mocks Lux’s previous list of disasters and she sticks her tongue out at him. “I’ll be back by either midnight or eight thirty, depending on whether he’s a dog person or a cat person.”

Gracie pretends to barf and Lux wolf-whistles. He loves these girls to death.

He pulls his jacket on and spins around to examine himself at different angles in the hall mirror. “How do I look? Do I look okay?” he asks out loud, straightening his shirt collar to his liking. “Are three buttons good, or am I showing too much chest?”

Gracie hums and says, “you look great, Dad,” but she sounds distracted. He looks over at her, about to ask when exactly her enthusiasm took a day off and went on vacation, but she’s not even paying him any attention. She’s pouring over the latest letter with the amount of concentration he’d like to see focused on her homework more often.

“You liar!” Harry accuses her, pouting at himself in the mirror and tugging a hand through his gelled up hair. “I look stupid and too fancy and like I’m trying to make people think I’m rich.” He turns his pout in the direction of Lux and Gracie. “Do I look like I’m trying too hard?”

“Yes, because you _are_ trying too hard,” Lux calls over her shoulder, grabbing the tv remote to turn up the volume. Harry wishes she’d turned around and say it to his face, because she’s missing his perfectly executed glare.

“This is the best letter yet,” Gracie declares, flipping it over to the other side. “His name is Louis, Dad. Louis Tomlinson.” When Harry ignores her again in favor of complaining about the heels on his boots being too high and ‘I look like I’m trying to be tall but I’m already tall, this is _stupid_ ,’ she pouts. “He sounds decent. Doesn’t he sound decent, Dad?”

“Sure, yeah,” Harry says, checking his pockets to make sure he has his phone.

Lux smirks, “He sounds hot, is what he sounds like.”

“Haven’t either of you ever heard the expression, don’t judge a book by it’s cover?” Harry puts his hands on his hips. “You’re deciding you like him over a letter he probably didn’t even write.”

Lux ignores him and leans over Gracie to look at the letter. “My my my, what nice _hand_ writing.” She and Gracie share matching smiles. “I think we have a winner.”

Harry checks his watch, cursing under his breath when he sees it’s seven minutes past the time he wanted to leave. He can’t be late—it’s the last thing he needs—because if there’s one thing he knows for sure, it’s that nobody likes tardy people.

He goes to grab his keys off the hook by the door, but a hand on his arm stops him in his tracks. “Dad!” Gracie’s shouting, running laps around him like an excited puppy. “Read this, read this!”

It must be at least half decent if it’s practically causing her to do jumping jacks. Harry sighs, taking the letter out of her hand before she manages to rip it to shreds.

“Dear Sleepless and Gracie, I have never written a—blah, blah, blah…” His eyes scan the paper at the same speed he’s used to read all of the letters he’s seen so far, and he’s about to fold it back up and stick it on the reject pile when one line in particular catches his eye.

“ _And while we’re on the subject of football,_ ” he reads out loud, and then furrows his eyebrows as he reads the rest of the sentence. The person goes on to clarify that by football they meant British football, as in soccer.

That must’ve been the line that got Gracie so excited, because she starts nodding so enthusiastically that Harry’s worried she’ll break her neck. “That means he’s British!” she says, tugging on his coat sleeve. “Just like us!”

“He’s probably just trying to come off as intelligent,” Harry brushes it aside, but Gracie stamps her foot in an uncharacteristic show of stubbornness, and it makes Harry pause.

“It’s a _sign_ ,” Gracie says, stamping her foot again, and Harry clenches his jaw. He’s got places to go and people to see, and he does _not_ have time for this right now.

“A sign?” Harry repeats, steering her over to the map of the United States that’s mounted in the kitchen. “I’ll show you a sign. Here’s your sign.” He looks at her expectantly. “Show me where Seattle is.”

Gracie shoots him a look like he’s insane, but points to it anyway, barely able to reach it way up at the top left corner of the map, even when she stands up on her tip toes.

“Very good,” Harry says. She has some sketchy knowledge of geography, but for now, it’ll have to do. “And where did you say Louis Tomlinson is from?”

“Baltimore,” Gracie mumbles, finally catching his drift.

Harry puts his hands on his hips and raises his eyebrows. “Where’s Baltimore?”

When she doesn’t do anything other than cross her arms over her chest, he stabs his finger over the big red dot smack in the middle of Maryland. “Ahhh, right there!” he cries out sarcastically. “Do you see how far away that is from us?” He’s beginning to raise his voice without meaning to, and he hears Lux sigh from across the room, but at this point he doesn’t even care. He counts each state as he goes across the map. “Look: one, two, three, four—there’s like twenty-six states between us and him. Now _that’s_ a sign.”

Gracie glares up at him from underneath her eyelashes, but stays quiet, and that’s good enough for Harry.

“I’m leaving now,” he says, more to Lux than to Gracie. “Please don’t make the tv explode. Goodbye, sayonara, I love you,” he calls out as he slams the door behind him.

By the time he’s putting his car in drive and setting off towards downtown Seattle, he’s forgotten all about that stupid letter.

—

Harry meets Nick at a deceivingly tiny yet beautifully decorated Italian restaurant called L’orizzonte, tucked away in the high class residential neighborhood of Capitol Hill. The floor is a maze of dark wooden tables encircled by red leather chairs. Strings of lightbulbs are draped along the ceiling, branching out from the chandeliers, and there are amber incense burners placed strategically along the walls. Soft instrumental music drifts over the room like a summer breeze, and Harry is positive that this is the most expensive place he’s set foot in in his entire life.

He’s suddenly extremely glad he dressed up a little more than he normally would. Screw Lux and Gracie; Harry knows what he’s talking about.

The thing about this restaurant, Harry notices as the hostess leads him to the table where Nick is seated (it’s right by the windows with a beautiful view of the Seattle skyline and Harry is incredibly overwhelmed), is that every single member of the wait staff is absolutely gorgeous. They could all be gods and goddesses for all Harry knows, with their sleek, dark hair and beautiful olive skin. And, to make matters worse, all of them seem to know Nick by name. They wink at Harry when they see him seated across from him, patting Nick on the back as they pass by and smiling like lions with their perfect white teeth.

“Hi,” Harry says as he puts his napkin on his lap, voice wavering slightly with nervousness.

“Hi,” Nick says back with a grin. “You look nice.”

Harry takes in Nick’s quiffed up hair and suit jacket and says shyly, “You look nice yourself.”

There’s a bit of a silence while their waitress comes over to take Harry’s wine order, and then Nick surprises Harry by admitting, “I didn’t expect you to call me, you know.”

“What?” Harry laughs as he tears off a piece of a breadstick and dips it into a bowl of olive oil.

“I mean, I wanted you to,” Nick rushes to say, and it’s the first time Harry’s ever seen him flustered. “I just thought you never would, because, well,” he shrugs and smiles at Harry, a little self-deprecatingly, and Harry doesn’t get it, because Nick is the most unabashedly confident person Harry’s ever met, but he likes it.

“I’m glad I did,” Harry tells him.

Half an hour later, their plates are half empty and they’re in a deep conversation about who their favorite Beatle was and why. They’re subconsciously leaning towards each other while they debate, and Harry hasn’t had this much fun in a while.

So, of course, that’s when the ringer on Harry’s phone blares, vibrating obnoxiously against his leg. Harry excuses himself and pulls out his phone, thinking maybe it’s Niall calling to complain about another argument he’s having with Barbara (it’s been happening a lot lately, because Barbara has been hinting that she wants a baby but Niall isn’t ready yet), but when he sees it’s Lux’s number calling him, he frowns.

“Excuse me,” he smiles apologetically at Nick while his eyes are still glued to his phone. “I have to take this, I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll be pining for you,” Nick says with a flirty wave of his hand as Harry weaves his way through the room towards the door.

The second he’s stepped outside, he slides his thumb across the screen to answer the call. Before he can even get a word in, Gracie’s shouting, “ _Dad!_ ” and he immediately assumes the worst.

“What is it, Gray?” He rushes to ask, stepping closer to the edge of the balcony so he can hear her more clearly. “Has something happened? Are you alright? Do you need me to come home?”

Gracie still hasn’t said anything back and he’s going to go hysterical if she doesn’t answer him within the next three milliseconds.

It takes him a moment to realize she’s laughing at him. “No,” she’s saying, “everything’s _fine_. We’re watching Aladdin and Luxie made me hot chocolate and s’mores. I was just wondering—” She stops like she’s holding her breath, and now Harry’s even more confused. Did she really call him and interrupt his date with Nick just to ramble on about how great of a babysitter Lux is? Maybe Lux put her up to this; maybe it’s all a ploy to get him to up her wages.

It’s then that he realizes she still hasn’t started talking again. “What?” he prompts her, “you were just wondering about what?”

“I was wondering if…” She sighs and seems to psyche herself up, because next thing he knows she’s speaking a mile a minute and barely giving him a chance to make out what she’s saying. “Is there any way we can fly to New York? Louis Tomlinson—you remember him, right? He’s the one who wrote the letter we got, the British one—he wants to meet us at the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day!”

Harry can’t believe what he’s hearing. “Gracie,” he says, pausing to try and figure out the best way to let her down gently. The only logical explanation he can think of is that she’s gone delusional. “Are you alright? Have you fallen and hit your head? Are you bleeding?”

“No!” Gracie says indignantly, as if _he’s_ the crazy one. He’s willing to bet that she’s rolling her eyes.

“Is Lux there? Has she been strangled?”

“Dad, _what_ are you  _talking_ about?” Gracie asks, outraged, and Harry can sympathize with her reaction completely.

Harry sighs. “So this is the only reason for this phone call?”

“Did you know that Sophia, Jamie’s mom, is a travel agent?”

Harry has a feeling he knows where this is going.

“Well, yes,” he says slowly, getting a little annoyed with her. He would appreciate it if she would leave him alone and let him enjoy his date with Nick in peace, which was going very well, thank you very much. “I did in fact know that ‘Sophia, Jamie’s mom, is a travel agent,’ but I’m not—”

“Jamie says that if we booked our flight now, we could get an excursion fare!”

Harry takes a second to inhale and exhale the way they tell you to when you’re doing a cool down in yoga, so he doesn’t blow up and yell at her on the phone in front of an expensive restaurant and look like a lunatic.

“Gracie, we’re not going to have this conversation right now. We’ll discuss this some other time, and that’s _if_ I don’t decide to ground you for scaring me half to death and interrupting my date for something as stupid as this. Oh, and tell Lux to turn the movie off, do you hear me?”

He must sound stern enough to make something click in Gracie’s mind, because when she sighs and says, “okay,” she sounds regretful.

Well, good.

“Go to bed, Gracie. _Now._ ” And with that, he hangs up and takes a deep breath to collect himself before heading back inside.

Back at their table, Nick is using the reflective surface of his wine glass as a mirror to fix his hair. He looks up when Harry approaches and smiles hesitantly at his expression.

“Is everything okay? You look a bit… frustrated,” he says, clearly trying to put it lightly.

Harry forces himself to smile as convincingly as he can. “Oh, everything’s fine.” He takes his irritation out on his phone, shoving it back into his pocket as he sits down. “Do you have any kids?”

Nick places his hand over his heart. “I’m sorry to say that I don’t.”

“You want mine?” Harry asks as he spears a piece of grilled chicken. “Five bucks.”

—

The following Thursday, Nick brings dinner to Harry’s house as a thank you to Harry for calling him. After ten minutes of arguing with Gracie, he’d finally gotten her to agree to eating with them under the terms that Harry needs her professional opinion when it comes to people he’s going to date. If she doesn’t like him, then he knows it’s not going to work out.

When push comes to shove, Gracie is Harry’s number one priority in almost everything he does, and she knows it.

After almost an hour of Gracie ruthlessly grilling Nick for any information she can use against him (Harry has a feeling she’s still stuck on Louis Tomlinson), Harry calls it quits.

“Alright, Gracie,” he says as they’re cleaning up from dinner. “I think it’s time for bed.”

“But it’s only nine thirty,” she says as she lets her dishes clatter in the sink, just to annoy him.

“That’s right, it’s only nine thirty,” Harry says with a forced smile. “Go get into your pajamas and I’ll come up and say goodnight.”

“Last time I checked, I don’t have a bedtime,” Gracie mutters under her breath, and she gets to the stairs fast enough that Harry misses when he tries to throw his napkin at her.

She’s halfway up the stairs when she stops and leans over the railing. “Thanks for dinner, Nick. I’ve never seen anyone cook rice that way.” With that, she puts on a saccharine smile, curtsies, and clomps up the stairs to her room.

As soon as she’s out of sight, Harry slumps against the fridge. “I’m just a lonely man trying to live his life,” he whines pitifully. “What have I done to deserve teenage angst from an eight-year-old?”

Nick laughs and rubs a hand across his back. “If it makes you feel better,” he says with a gentle smile, “my sister’s kid is way worse.”

**—**

An hour later, Harry and Nick are still out talking on the deck. Gracie sneaks downstairs and spies on them from behind the couch, scribbling down anything that might be important to mention when she discusses this with Jamie and Kaya tomorrow at school.

It’s not until she looks up and sees them leaning in for a _kiss_ that she realizes this is worse than she had anticipated.

Crawling across the floor, ninja style, Gracie makes her way over to the house phone and dials the only number she can think of.

**—L—**

Louis reaches out blindly for his ringing phone.

“Turn on your radio!” Zayn says with no introduction, sounding excited.

Louis cracks his eyes open. “Zayn, it is eleven o’clock at night and I just took the biggest sleeping pill known to man. Why should I go all the way downstairs to listen to the radio?”

“The daughter of the guy you’re obsessed with is on again,” he explains.

Louis faceplants back into his pillow.

“Harry’s kid,” Zayn elaborates, “Gracie. You know who I’m talking about.”

“Can’t you just tell me what she says tomorrow?” Louis groans.

Zayn’s not having it. “Look, Louis. You’ve got me hooked on this guy too, and if I’m up listening to this shit, then you better get your ass up and listen with me.”

“Who is it?” Aiden rolls over to face him, his voice rough with sleep.

“It’s Zayn,” Louis says softly, getting out of bed. “Go back to sleep, Aid, I’ll talk to him downstairs.”

“I see you still haven’t told him,” Zayn says on the other end of the line, sounding amused.

“Shut the fuck up,” Louis grumbles as he heads downstairs. He flips on the kitchen light and presses a button on the radio. It comes to life, and Louis spins the dial to Dr. Wilde’s station so fast it nearly breaks off.

“—outside kissing him right this minute!” Gracie’s voice is saying when the radio finally picks up the signal.

Louis gasps, nearly dropping his phone into the sink, barely hearing Dr. Wilde ask Gracie who her father’s new beau is. “What? Zayn! Who’s he kissing? I don’t—”

Zayn aggressively shushes him. “Just listen!”

“—came over and cooked dinner. He brought three grocery bags, like he was going to stay here for a year! He’s not a good match for my dad. He’s annoying and snobby and I hate him. You have to help me get rid of him.”

“Now, Gracie,” Dr. Wilde says, “You need to have more faith in your father. I’m sure he can judge whether someone is right or wrong for him, don’t you think?”

“No!” Gracie sounds frantic. “He’s—he’s kissing him on the lips now! Right on the lips! He’s a hoe! My dad’s been captured by a hoe!”

Louis can hear Zayn’s faint laughter in one ear. “She’s got that right.”

**—H—**

“Gracie, you need to calm down. When you see your dad tomorrow, tell him how you feel.” Dr. Wilde slips into her annoyingly smooth therapist voice. “It’s not good to let your emotions build up inside of you…”

Gracie has had enough. It’s time to take matters into her own hands.

She slams the home phone down onto the table, takes a step back, and screams at the top of her lungs.

Instantly, Harry and Nick break apart, Harry nearly pushing him over the railing and into the marina in his haste to get the door open. Gracie would be laughing hysterically right now if she weren’t so upset.

“Gracie, what’s the matter?” Harry yells, rushing over to her and grabbing her by her shoulders.

She says the first excuse that comes to mind. “I thought I saw a black widow spider!”

“You scared me to death.” Harry is so angry that his face slips into a frightening calm. “The next time you think you see a black widow spider, I want you to say, ‘Dad, excuse me, but I believe a poisonous insect is running around the house,’ and I will come and deal with it in a civilized manner.”

He fixes Gracie with one of his glares, and she shrinks back. “You scream like that again, and I’ll kill you.”

**—**

“I love this letter,” Jamie tells Gracie at lunch the next day.

“You _have_ to write back to him,” Kaya says earnestly. “It’s Y.O.H.”

Gracie furrows her eyebrows. As far as she knows, they haven’t made up that acronym yet. “What’s Y.O.H.?”

Kaya and Jamie each put a hand on one of her shoulders.

“Your only hope.”

**—L—**

Every year, the National Newspaper Association organizes a convention in one of the top fifty most populated cities in America. This year (because, as we have already established, the universe hates Louis Tomlinson’s guts), the convention is being held in Seattle, Washington, and Louis has been picked as one of the representatives for the Baltimore Sun.

Will the wonders never cease?

And, of course, Louis could always politely decline and let Zayn go in his place, but Zayn sat him down in the break room over a cup of watery tea and basically forced him to go, because Zayn is apparently obsessed with destiny and won’t let Louis risk the 1% chance he has of meeting Harry in person.

When Aiden found out Louis was going to be in Seattle for the entirety of the next week, he almost had an aneurysm. Aiden was scheduled to travel to D.C. for a business meeting the following Friday, which meant they literally wouldn’t see each other again until they met up in New York City on Valentine’s Day.

All of that, combined with the most stressful and anxiety-ridden three and a half hours that Louis has ever had to endure, he’s never been happier to see the Baltimore-Washington International Airport disappear into the distance as his plane takes off and rises up into the clouds.

After the captain has welcomed them aboard and announced that they have reached the desired cruising altitude, the flight attendants come by with sodas and tiny bags of peanuts and pretzels.

Louis must have sighed extra loudly as he pulled open his packet of peanuts, because the woman next to him turns to him and says, “Do you hate flying?” with an understanding smile.

Louis, who had been chewing for the latter half of her question, mishears her. “Oh, _yes_ , I _hate_ it. I just told the worst one to the man I’m about to marry.”

Her smile turns confused. “What?”

“Do you feel that any lie is a betrayal?” Louis pops another handful of peanuts into his mouth and looks at her like she has all of the answers.

The woman looks at him like he’s lost his mind. “I said _flying_.”

**—H—**

“Thanks so much for waiting with me,” Nick says to Harry while they wait at the gate for his flight to Las Vegas.

“Oh, it’s really no trouble,” Harry says. He looks at Gracie, who’s got her face pressed up against the windows, watching in awe as plane after plane takes off. “She loves the airport.”

“Hey,” Nick says suddenly, putting a hand on Gracie’s shoulder. “Do you want me to bring you back a souvenir?” He turns to Harry when all Gracie does is look at him blankly. “Does she like snow globes?”

“I have a collection,” Gracie announces with a fake smile. “That would be great, thank you!” With that, she turns back to the window.

Harry leans over towards Nick, mindful of the hurt look he’s trying to hide. “She’s eight, remember?” When Nick doesn’t say anything, Harry smiles at him. “I read an article about this, actually. You know the terrible two phase toddlers get?” Nick nods. “It comes back at the age of eight, and it happens to all kids.”

Gracie’s making faces at Harry in the reflection of the glass, and Harry ignores her.

“Maybe when I get back, we can spend some time together on our own,” Nick suggests, and Harry smiles knowingly as they hug. “Bye, Harry. Bye, Gracie! Be good for your dad.”

Gracie sticks her finger in her mouth like she’s trying to make herself gag while Nick heads over to stand in line for boarding.

“Hey,” Harry says, kneeling down so he’s at her height. “I know you think you know a lot of things about a lot of things, but you don’t know Nick. He’s a mystery to me, too. He touches his hair a lot. Why? I have no idea. Is it a nervous twitch? Does he need a haircut? Or does he just like when his hair is touched, like me and you?”

Gracie presses her lips together in annoyance, but lets him talk.

“See, Gray?” Harry continues. “These are things I’m willing to get to the bottom of. I like him, and he makes me laugh, and that’s why I’m dating him.” He sighs. “I’m not moving in with him. I’m not marrying him. I’m simply _dating_ him, okay? Can you see the difference?”

Gracie stops looking annoyed and starts looking more understanding, for which Harry is thankful.

“This is what single people do, right? They try other people to see if their puzzle piece fits in with theirs.”

“Nice analogy, Dad,” Gracie mutters, but she’s smiling.

It’s then that Harry notices that the doors to the jetway that leads to Nick’s plane have opened, and the passengers from the previous flight are entering the airport.

Harry pulls Gracie closer to him by her hand, so that she’s out of the path of the passengers exiting the jetway, and hugs her. “See, you get it. No one’s perfect, and I know that, and I accept that. There’s no such thing as a perfect—”

Someone’s bag brushes the top of Harry’s head.

“Sorry!” the stranger says, turning around to glance apologetically at him.

Harry freezes, because he has the sort of face that makes you feel like you’ve seen him before.

His blue eyes are framed by long lashes, and his smile is blinding as he flashes it over his shoulder at Harry before he hurries off in the direction of baggage claim.

“That’s alright,” Harry says slowly, but the man is too far away to have heard him.

Gracie pulls back from their hug. “Dad?” she asks hesitantly, confused by the dazed expression on his face, but Harry’s already standing up and grabbing her hand.

“Come on,” he says, never taking his eyes off the back of the man. He’s got a jean jacket on with a fuzzy white collar, and Harry’s determined not to lose sight of him.

“Hey, Dad,” Gracie says, skipping to keep up with his long strides. “Did I tell you about how me and Kaya were talking about reincarnation yesterday?” She doesn’t wait for him to reply before she keeps going. “Kaya believes that you knew Louis Tomlinson in another life, but it wasn’t the right time for you to get together, so you got reincarnated into this life. She says your hearts are like two birds who are always flying closer and closer to each other, or like a song; one of you is the melody and the other is the lyrics, and once you get together, the song is complete.”

“God damn it,” Harry whispers as the man goes down an escalator and is immediately followed by twenty other people. There’s no chance of Harry finding him now.

“Want to know why I know all of this and you don’t?” Gracie asks him.

“Pray tell,” Harry rolls his eyes in amusement.

“Because I’m younger and purer,” Gracie explains. Harry scoffs at her word choice. “So I’m more in touch with cosmic forces than you are.”

Harry honks out a laugh. “Who told you this load of crap?”

“Jamie did!” Gracie tells him, “and it’s not crap. It’s science!”

“Well,” Harry says, winking at her. “I hope you don’t marry Jamie.”

**—L—**

Sitting alone amidst the hustle and bustle of a crowded airport is not fun. Louis can only take people-watching for so long until everyone starts to blend together into one big mass of businessmen and businesswomen. He’s even entertained the idea to go to the newsstand and buy a puzzle book, that’s how bored he is. He finished the book he’d brought with him on the flight to Seattle, and he doesn’t have any games on his phone because he’s one of those people (aka, one of those _stupid_ people).

So, he does the only thing he really can do while he waits for his flight back to Baltimore.

He calls Zayn.

The first thing Zayn says when he picks up is, “Did you find him?”

Louis, who had been pretending that he wasn’t keeping a lookout for some guy he doesn’t even know the appearance of for the entire week, slumps dejectedly into his chair.

“No,” he sighs, but it’s not like it was really possible anyway.

“I bet you ran into him and didn’t know it was him.” Louis can hear Zayn’s smirk from all the way on the other side of the country. “You probably talked to him. Maybe he held the door open for you, or was seated at the table next to yours when you went out to dinner with the execs.”

“Zayn,” Louis whines, “you’re making me rethink every encounter I’ve had over the past seven days, and my head’s about to explode.”

“Sorry.” He doesn’t sound very sorry.

“Hey,” Louis says after a comfortable pause. “Is this crazy?”

“No,” Zayn says immediately, and he sounds completely sure of himself, “that’s the weirdest part about it.”

Louis can feel a smile spreading across his face. “Thank you,” he says, and he really means it. The intercom dings from the desk by the gate. “Hey, I’ve got to go, they’re about to start boarding.”

“I’m picking you up at the airport, right?”

“You’d better be,” Louis grins. “Bring some takeout with you, pleeeease. I can only survive on airline food for so long.”

Zayn sighs. “Your wish is my command.”

**—**

The first thing Louis did upon stepping through his front door was run upstairs, shower, and put some comfortable clothes on, i.e. sweatpants and fuzzy socks. Once that task was complete, he and Zayn settled at the table downstairs, surrounded by Louis’ unopened mail and Chinese takeout.

God, Louis is so thankful he has a Zayn. If Zayn wasn’t already married, Louis would marry him right this very second, just so his life would be less complicated.

He’s finished one container of sweet and sour chicken and is moving onto the egg roll calling his name when a blue envelope catches his eye. It’s covered in stickers of cats and stars and rainbows, and addressed to _Louis Tomlinson, Football Enthusiast_ with a green soccer ball drawn beside it in marker.

“What’s this?” Louis asks out loud. “It says it’s from Seattle.”

Zayn pales and excuses himself under the pretense that he has to pee.

Louis rips the envelope open, takes one look at the letter, and nearly snaps his fork in half. “Zayn!” he yells.

After a moment, Zayn slowly comes back from where he’d run off around the corner. “So, I mailed your letter,” he says when he finally makes eye contact with Louis. “Surprise?”

Louis can feel his heartbeat in his chest. “ _Dear Louis, thanks for your letter. It was great. You sound cool._ ” He stops to glare at Zayn, because he’s trying to hide his laughter behind his hand, and it’s extremely annoying.

“Sorry, keep going,” Zayn giggles, taking a deep breath and making his face as serious as possible.

“ _We’re looking forward to meeting you at the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day and seeing if we are—_ ” Louis furrows his eyebrows. Zayn is trying very hard not to smile. “ _—M.F.E.O._ ” Louis looks up at Zayn, clenching his jaw. “ _Can’t wait to see ya! Love, Sleepless in Seattle_. And that’s that.”

“Wait!” Zayn cries, making grabby hands for the letter. “What’s M.F.E.O.?”

Louis tucks his lips into his mouth and bites down, trying not to cry out in frustration.

“Made for each other.”

Zayn can’t control his laughter this time, and it sounds like air being let out of a whoopee cushion. “That’s so cute! It’s like a clue!”

Louis last all of five seconds before he screams.

“So what?” Zayn runs after him into the kitchen. “So what he can’t write? Verbal ability is a highly overrated thing in men these days.”

“Zayn,” Louis says, closing his eyes in exasperation. “I need you to leave.”

**—H—**

“Wait, let me get this straight,” Niall is saying as he takes another sip from his beer. “You made eye contact with him and felt an instant connection?”

Harry nods, picking halfheartedly at a raspberry on his fruit tart.

“That sounds like some déjà vu shit, bro. Very French. Very weird. Very past-life.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying!” Gracie pipes up from where she’s lying on the floor.

Harry groans. “Not you too,” he complains, narrowing his eyes when Gracie grins winningly at him, before lying back down like a plank and staying completely still. She’s practicing meditation, or something. Who even knows what goes on in that brain of hers.

“Hey, G,” Niall says, laughing before he can even finish his sentence, “What was that stunt you pulled on Christmas Eve your dad was telling me about? Something about a radio therapist?”

“Oh, yeah,” Harry scoffs, nudging Gracie with his socked foot. “Tell ‘em the story, Gray.” He rolls his eyes at Niall, who’s still laughing, and lands them on Barbara. “You’ll love this.”

“I called a radio show and told the doctor that Dad needs help finding a new wife.” She looks up at Harry and grins. “Or a husband! I’m not discriminating.”

Barbara sucks on her teeth and smiles at Gracie. “That’s so sweet!”

“And now she’s obsessed with this one guy who wrote me from Baltimore—”

“This is crazy,” Niall cackles, stealing the rest of Harry’s fruit tart.

“—because apparently he wants to meet me on the top of the Empire State Building.”

Gracie sits up and makes a heart with her hands. “On Valentine’s Day!”

“Okay, wait. I’ve got a question.” Niall leans forward and sets his elbows on the table. “What kind of person writes to someone they hear about on the radio? Isn’t that sort of…”

“Romantic?” Barbara fills in for him.

“No, I was thinking more along the lines of ‘fucked up.’” He glances at Harry. “Sorry for the language, Gray.”

“It’s fine.” She says it in a way that suggests she’s heard worse, and Barbara and Niall laugh at Harry’s outraged expression. “He’s actually gotten hundreds of letters from people all over the country.”

Niall laughs again. “Who knew U.S. citizens were so desperate?”

“Hey!” Barbara protests, “Just because people want to find the right person doesn’t make them desperate!”

“You know that saying?” Niall waves his hands in the air. Barbara scoffs and crosses her arms over her chest as she leans back in her chair, and Harry and Gracie smirk at each other. Niall and Barbara are the cutest married couple around, and it will always be hilarious when they get annoyed with each other. “It’s easier to be killed by a terrorist than to find a husband past the age of—”

“Don’t even start with me,” Barbara warns him with a raise of her fork. “That saying’s a load of shit, and you know it.”

Harry tries to get the conversation back on track. “All I want is someone I can hold a conversation with,” he says to the tablecloth. “Is that so much to ask?”

**—**

“We need to make a plan to get you to New York City,” Jamie says, pacing his bedroom wall to wall. “I’ve come to the conclusion that the only thing left to do is to go there yourself. I looked up some flights, and the soonest one leaves tomorrow afternoon.”

Gracie wrinkles her nose. “Isn’t that going to be really expensive?”

“It’s _extremely_ expensive,” Jamie whispers with an air of intelligence, “but if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that we’re getting you on that plane.”

**—L—**

“You’re going to miss your train,” Zayn says to Louis as he walks him to the elevator.

“I’m not! I’ve planned for extra time so nothing can go wrong.” For once in Louis’ life, he’s actually being organized. He’s pretty proud of himself. “I’m so happy,” he says as they wait for the elevator to reach their floor. “I finally feel wholly, completely happy.”

“You deserve to be happy,” Zayn tells him.

“I can’t wait to see him,” Louis says. He literally can’t stop smiling. “I’ve missed Aiden so much. I can’t believe it’s been almost two weeks.”

Zayn makes a face that Louis can’t interpret. “Neither can I.”

“Sleepless in Seattle is history,” Louis says as he steps into the elevator. “ _History_.”

**—**

Everything seemed to be happening in fast forward, from the time Louis stepped onto the train to the time it reached New York Penn Station. Throughout the whole cab ride to the hotel he and Aiden would be staying at, all Louis could do was marvel at the size of the city he was now a part of. The sun was beginning to set, casting everything in the golden light of dusk, and Louis felt light-headed, but not in a bad way.

He couldn’t explain it, exactly, but he just knew. He knew something big was about to happen, he just couldn’t put his finger down on what it was, but he _knew_.

It wasn’t until Aiden opened the door to their hotel room, bearing a grin and a tiny black box, that Louis realized what he’d been waiting for.

**—H—**

Harry was a complete mess, in every meaning of the word.

He was losing his mind, like soapy water going down the shower drain, and he was helpless to stop it.

“I’m leaving in an hour, Gracie,” Harry yells over his shoulder in the direction of her room as he stumbles around and tries to remember everything he needs to pack. “I’ll only be gone one night, and I’m leaving you in the care of Lux again, so if the tv really does explode this time, you’re dead.”

Gracie, having appeared out of literally nowhere, is now leaning against the doorway to his room. “Are you going with _him_?” she asked with a look of plainly-veiled disgust, obviously talking about Nick.

Harry is unimpressed, so he ignores her comment and continues his train of thought. “Against my better judgement, I’m trusting you not to do anything stupid.” He turns around to pack a sweater in his carryon bag. When Gracie doesn’t reply, he calls out, “Understand?”

Her response is the slamming of her bedroom door.

“Do not slam your door at me,” Harry yells, walking down the hallway and reopening her door. “What’s the matter with you, anyway?”

Gracie scoffs at him and starts blasting music from her CD player.

“This better not be about that man from Baltimore,” Harry warns her, yelling over the volume, “because I’m tired of you bring him up.”

“ _Louis_ ,” Gracie corrects him, and Harry hasn’t ever been so frustrated with her in all the years he’s been a parent (and trust him, his patience has been tested numerous times).

“I’m not going to New York City, not even if the apocalypse hits and it’s the only safe place on the east coast.” He lets the door fall shut behind him as he goes back to his room to finish packing, and he’s not at all surprised when Gracie storms out of her room right after him. They’re both stubborn and know how to provoke each other like no one else.

“I don’t care what you do!” she shouts at him.

“Great! Fine! Marvelous!” Harry yells back, shoving a wadded up pair of socks into his bag along with a scarf and a pair of gloves.

“ _This_ is the one I like,” Gracie says, emphasizing Louis’ letter as she holds it up, waving it around in the air.

“You know, Gray,” Harry says quietly. “You’re not going to like _anyone_ I bring home because they won’t be your mother.”

Gracie’s face twists up in exasperation. “How do you know, Dad?” she asks. “What’s so bad about Louis? Why won’t you even give him a chance?”

Harry stares at her, daring her to keep going.

“I know why,” Gracie says quietly. “It’s because you’re a coward.”

“You know what, Gracie?” Harry’s anger has been boiling up like a fire just waiting to ignite, and it’s just been given the spark it needed. “Shut up!”

“Shut up?” she shrieks in outrage. “Shut up? Mom never said ‘shut up’ to me! Mom never yelled at me! You don’t get to do that, that’s not right!”

Harry spins around. “It’s not my fault that she’s gone, okay? But I think I get to decide who I am and am not interested in. Last time I checked, you were the eight-year-old and I was the adult, and it’s staying that way.”

“Why won’t you go to New York?”

Harry literally cannot believe her right now. “There is _no way_ we are going on a plane to meet some guy who could, for all you know, be some crazy, sick lunatic! You know that’s insane, Gray. You have to admit that’s insane.”

Gracie narrows her eyes. “I’m not leaving ‘til you say yes.”

Harry’s brain is so all over the place, so angry and overwhelmed and just flat out _done_ , that he does the only thing he can think of to do. He slams his bedroom door.

“I _hate_ you!” Gracie screams as she storms back to her room.

“Good!” Harry yells back. “You’ll have a lot of stuff to tell Oprah when she asks how your dad ruined your life!”

Twenty minutes later, the doorbell rings. Harry goes down and see that it’s Lux, here to watch Gracie for the night. He’s never been so happy to see another person in his entire life.

“I just have to warn you,” he says to her as she takes off her coat. “Gray is really pissed off because we had another fight about her obsession with that Louis guy. She’ll probably just stay in her room for the entire night and not talk to you, and I’m sorry about that. Maybe you’ll figure out a way to break her out of her mood.”

“Harry,” Lux says, unzipping her boots, “I have three younger sisters. If anyone can do it, it’s me.”

Harry leads them up the stairs and opens the door to Gracie’s room. “Hey, Gray, Lux is here and I’ve gotta go.”

When he sees that she’s not in her room, he heads towards the bathroom. “Alright, Gracie, listen, I’m sorry. I have to leave, but I promise—”

She’s not in the bathroom either, or in his office downstairs, or on the deck. She isn’t anywhere.

Harry’s heart leaps into his throat.

**—**

The only person Harry could think of who would know where Gracie had gone is Jamie Payne.

“Where’s Jamie?” Harry asks the second Sophia opens the door. Harry had called her to let her know he was coming, Lux holding his phone out while Harry sped across Seattle, breaking about ten traffic laws trying to get to their house as quickly as possible.

“He’s in the living room,” Sophia says, letting them inside.

Liam runs down the stairs to meet them. “I’m so sorry this happened, I honestly didn’t know anything about it. If I had, I—”

“Liam,” Harry smiles as best he can, heart warming a little at the worry in Liam’s kind brown eyes. “It’s not your fault, and I appreciate the help on such short notice.” They step into the living room, and Harry notices the way Jamie doesn’t look up to greet him.

“Hey, Jamie,” Harry says, sitting next to him on the couch. Might as well cut right to the chase. “Do you know where Gracie is?”

“I haven’t seen her since yesterday,” Jamie says.

Harry picks his words carefully. “I didn’t ask when you’d last seen her, I asked if you knew where she was.”

“Could she be at Kaya’s house?” Sophia asks.

“Kaya doesn’t live within walking distance of us,” Harry tells her, trying to breathe normally and not dip too far down into panic mode.

Liam kneels down in front of his son. “Jay, I need you to tell us where she is,” he says, calm and gentle in the easy way he always is.

Jamie flushes nervously and shakes his head.

“Anything you know can help us tremendously,” Harry adds. “I know you want to keep it a secret, but I just want to make sure she’s safe and not in any danger.”

Jamie looks up at Liam hesitantly, before glancing at Harry. “N.Y.,” he whispers.

“No way?” Liam tries to translate, looking helplessly at Harry and Sophia.

Sophia shakes her head. “No, that would be N.W.”

“Wait…” Harry says, eyes widening in horror as he connects the dots.

Jamie must realize that he understands him, because he nods his head meekly. “She’s on her way to New York.”

“What?” Sophia shrieks, at the same time that Harry shouts, “How?” Lux brings a hand to her mouth like she’s going to throw up with anxiety.

“She got a plane ticket. Flight 2517.”

The blood drains from Harry’s face. “When does it leave?”

Jamie shrinks back as far as he can and whispers, “7:30.”

“It’s already taken off,” Sophia says faintly, staring at the clock on the mantle.

Liam grabs Harry’s arm. “The next flight should be in forty-five minutes or so. If you run, you might be able to make it.”

Harry curses, rushing out to his car.

**—**

This is Gracie’s first time in New York, and she’s kicking herself repeatedly for forgetting to bring her camera.

The airport is filled to the brim with people from all walks of life and with every skin color known to man, and Gracie doesn’t want to blink for fear she might miss something.

Somehow, she finds her way to the airport’s exit and into the line of people waiting for a cab.

“Where to, kid?” the man hailing cabs asks her when she reaches the front of the line.

“Empire State Building, please,” Gracie tells him, and he smiles at her.

**—**

“There it is!” The cab stops at the curb, and Gracie momentarily forgets she has to pay the driver, she’s so distracted by trying to get a glimpse of it through the smudged window.

“What’cha gonna do when you get up there?” the driver asks her as she hands him more than enough cash. “Spit off the top?”

“No,” she laughs at his accent. “I’m going to meet my new dad.”

**—L—**

Funnily enough, the table in the hotel restaurant that their waiter leads them to has a perfect view of the Empire State Building through the windows. Why, might you ask? Take a wild guess.

That’s right. Because the universe hates Louis with a passion.

It’s not until Aiden touches his hand and asks if he’s okay that Louis realizes he’s been staring through the windows with a startling intensity.

“Oh, yeah,” Louis says, physically shaking himself out of whatever this daze is. “I’m fine, I’m—” He gets distracted again by the twinkling of the lights in the Empire State Building.

“We’ll have some champagne, thank you,” Aiden tells their waiter, who nods and shuffles off to fetch them a bottle and some glasses.

“Wow,” Aiden says, looking out at the New York skyline. “It’s a fantastic view, don’t you think?” When Louis hesitates before answering, Aiden turns to look at him, his brow arched with curiosity. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Aiden, I—” Louis swallows against the lump in his throat. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

**—H—**

The millisecond after Harry gets off the plane and into John F. Kennedy airport, he runs as fast as he can, racing through crowds of people in search of the exit like his life depends on it.

He guesses it kind of does.

**—**

Gracie props herself up against the wall of the observation deck and wraps her arms around her knees. It’s a lot colder up here than she’d anticipated, and with every passing minute she’s beginning to realize how stupid of an idea this was.

She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and prays Louis gets here soon.

**—L—**

“—and there’s a one in a million chance that he could—” Louis pauses to take a sip of his champagne, and his hand is shaking so much that he nearly spills it all over the tablecloth.

“—could be on top of the Empire State Building right at this moment,” Aiden finishes for him, quietly toying with his napkin.

“Yeah,” Louis says on an exhale. He seeks out Aiden’s gaze, and his eyes are dull and sad. “Hey, I know this is going to sound stupid, but it’s not you. It’s me, and I can’t…”

Aiden tries to smile. “Louis, I love you, and we both know that, but let’s leave that out of this for a moment, okay?”

Louis nods, scared out of his wits to see where this is going.

“I don’t want to be someone you’re settling for. Hell, I don’t want to be someone _anyone_ just settles for.” This time, when Aiden smiles, it’s real. “Marriage is hard enough without setting such low expectations, isn’t it?”

“Aiden,” Louis says, reaching out for his hand. “I don’t deserve you.”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way, but…” Aiden tilts his head, “okay.”

They both laugh, a little shaky and a little heartbroken, but they’re smiling.

As Louis hands him back the ring, something in the window catches his eye.

He looks up, out at the skyline, and gasps.

The side of the Empire State Building is lit up with a red heart, surrounded by whites and blues.

“It’s a sign,” Louis whispers.

Aiden squeezes his hand. “Who needed a sign?”

**—H—**

The second the elevator doors open, Harry bursts out onto the observation deck and yells, “Gracie!”

“Dad!” her voice calls back, and she comes barreling around the corner and straight into his arms. Harry picks her up, spinning her around in circles and repeating to himself to never let her out of his sight again.

Once they stop spinning, Harry holds her out in front of him and kisses all over her face. “What if something had happened to you?” he asks her, “What if you got hurt and I couldn’t get to you?”

“I’m sorry,” Gracie tells him, leaning back in to press her face into his neck. Her lips are chapped and her hands are like little balls of ice, and Harry doesn’t know what he’d do without her.

“Gray,” he whispers as he sets her down, “you’re all I have, okay? You’re all I’ve got.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” she promises, wiping her eyes.

Harry takes her face into his hands. “We’re doing okay, aren’t we? We’re doing alright. I mean—” He pushes his hair out of his face when the wind picks up. “—I haven’t done anything stupid, have I? I haven't screwed it up for the both of us?”

“No,” Gracie says, shaking her head and sniffling in the cold. “You haven’t, I swear.”

“Come here,” Harry says, wrapping her up in his coat. They stay like that for a few seconds, and then Gracie whispers, barely decipherable over the wind,

“I thought he’d be here.”

Harry sighs as he runs his fingers through her hair, leading her inside and towards the elevator. “So did I.”

**—L—**

Normally, Louis isn’t one for running through crowded city streets— _especially_ not if the streets are still slick from a recent rainfall, because yes, he does have some dignity—but right now, the only thing he’s focused on is getting to the top of the Empire State Building. He doesn’t care what it takes to get up there, he’ll do absolutely _anything_ , because he knows without a doubt that he'll never let himself live it down if he finds out he missed Harry. His poor heart can only handle one life-altering occurrence at a time.

He nearly steps on a woman’s foot when she stops abruptly to look at something displayed in a shop window. He only pauses to looks back and shout, “Sorry!” as he keeps running. Her and the man walking behind her stare after him in confusion, but Louis thinks his hasty apology will have to suffice.

He sprints across the street at a pace that nearly sends him slipping on the pavement, and finally, _finally_ he sees the familiar black awning over the entrance to the Empire State Building. The revolving doors can’t spin fast enough, and the soles of Louis' shoes squeak in protest against the marble floor as he nearly brains himself on the glass in his haste to get into the lobby.

His adrenalin is pumping and his hands are going numb. It’s getting difficult to ignore the stitches in his side, but Louis didn't play soccer and run track and field in high school for nothing. He has his sights set on those escalator stairs and he's determined to make it up there before it's too late.

There’s no negotiating it; he _has_ to.

When he reaches the security guard’s desk at the end of the lobby, he’s almost too out of breath to say anything. “Observation deck,” he wheezes, planting his hands on the counter to stop his momentum before he flies over the desk and into the arms of the security guard.

The guard shakes his head, a frown on his face. “Sorry, sir,” he says as he tips his hat at him apologetically, "but you're too late.”

“No,” Louis breaths out, clenching his eyes shut. When he opens them again, the look in the guard's eyes has morphed into pity. “No,” Louis repeats, louder. “ _Please_ , I really need to get up there!”

“We’re closed, sir. No more runs tonight,” the guard says, watching Louis as he slumps against the counter in defeat.

Louis shuts his eyes as he pants, trying to calm his racing heart. He sends one more fleeting prayer that if Harry’s up there on the observation deck and waiting for Louis to arrive, he'll find a floor tile interesting to look at or something, _anything_ to keep him up there for the next thirty seconds. He flew across the entire country to find this guy—he blew off his fucking _engagement_ for him—and Louis would sooner voluntarily get run over by a train before he gave up this easily.

With a renewed fire in his heart, he meets the eyes of the guard. “Listen,” he says, “there’s a someone up there that I’m supposed to meet. He’s probably left by now, God knows I would have, but I just—”

Louis stops to catch his breath, and the guard’s pressing his lips together and looking at him hesitantly, like he might just let him bend the rules. That's all Louis needs.

“Can I please just see if he’s up there?" Louis asks again. He sounds so desperate, and normally he'd be mortified, but he can't even think straight right now let alone feel bad for himself. He's not leaving this building until he gets up on that deck, even if it kills him. "If I don’t at least look, I’ll always wonder."

The guard sighs and runs a hand down his face. For a moment, Louis really thinks he’s about to say no.

He’s in the middle of picturing the look on Zayn’s face when he finds out this was all for nothing when the guard looks up at him.

“My wife would kill me if I didn't let you check," he mutters. He looks like he's weighing the pros and cons of breaking the rules as a security guard, but he must see something in Louis' eyes, because next thing he knows he's holding the keys to the elevator and stepping out from behind the desk.

"Come on,” he says to Louis with a smile as they head up the escalator. “Let’s go find your man.”

In the elevator, Louis smooths his sweaty palms down the legs of his jeans and tries to remember the breathing exercises his mum taught him when he was little. The guard is watching him with a pensive expression on his face, and it makes every hair on Louis’ body stand up. His fingers are prickling and his vision’s going wonky and he’s never felt this nervous in his entire life.

The elevator dings as it reaches the 86th floor. Louis sends his reflection one last glance in the mirror, reaches up to adjust his fringe, and then the doors are opening.

It's silent except for the howling of the wind against the other side of the glass. Even the guard seems to hold his breath as Louis steps out onto the landing, but it only takes a second for Louis to realize that Harry’s not there.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the guard says, looking down at his feet, “Empty.”

When Louis sighs, it feels like his soul is being ripped out of his body.

He presses his lips together and breathes out slowly through his nose to try and keep his tears at bay.

“Can I just take a minute?” he whispers, and the guard is helpless but to let him go.

When he pushes the door open to the observation deck, the wind whips his hair back from his face and sends a shiver down his spine. For a moment, it looks like there’s someone standing there, but then Louis blinks and sees it’s just the silhouette of a telescope. He takes a step and glances around, just to make sure Harry’s not hiding somewhere and waiting to jump out and surprise him, but no.

He really thought he’d be here, but by some ugly twist of fate, he isn’t.

Louis’ knees nearly buckle with the realization that he’s lost him.

He wraps his arms around himself as he steps up to the fence separating him from the city, pulling the flaps of his coat together to fight the chill of the night air. He tries to think optimistically, tries to bring himself to smile at how beautiful the city is, all laid out before him, but he can’t. He’s _lost_ him.

New York City really does look absolutely breathtaking from this high up, with every light in every window glittering like tiny fires. The Chrysler building stands tall and regal against the dark backdrop of the night, but Louis can’t bring himself to truly appreciate it. His throat feels like it’s closing in on itself, and when he blinks again, his tears blur the lights together into a sea of white and gold.

Louis doesn’t know how long he stands there staring out at the vastness of the city and feeling very, very small, but eventually the dulled down sound of a car horn carries up from eighty stories below him and Louis snaps out of it.

 _Face it, pal_ , he thinks to himself, shaking his head self-deprecatingly as he turns to go back inside. _You missed your chance._

As he turns to go back inside, the tip of his shoes bumps into something. He looks down at the ground, and sitting there slumped against the base of the tower binocular is a tiger stuffed animal, propped up by a pastel purple backpack. There’s a blue and white friendship bracelet tied to one of the zipper pulls and a big rainbow patch sewed into the front pocket, and it reminds him so much of his little sisters' bags from back when they were in elementary school that it makes Louis stop in his tracks.

He reaches down to pick it up on instinct before it occurs to him that if a little girl were to run out here right now, their first thought would logically be that he’s trying to steal it. He looks over his shoulder, but there’s no one else on the observation deck.

He turns it over in his hands as he straightens up again, and his fingers run along the name printed across it. _Gracie_ , it says in big black letters. There’s a heart dotting the _i_ and a flower next to the _e_ , and his breath catches in his throat.

He hears the whoosh of the observation deck doors opening and turns, thinking it’s the guard coming to tell him his time is up, but it’s not.

It’s not, it’s—

It’s Harry.

“I left it by the telescope,” a little voice is saying, the exact same voice that said, _“Hi, this is Gracie,”_ on the radio on Christmas Eve all those weeks ago, and _oh_.

The voice is attached to a little girl with long eyelashes and tiny freckles and crazy curly hair sticking out of the bottom of her bobble hat, and Louis feels lightheaded all of a sudden because that’s _Harry's_ hand she's holding.

 _Harry_ , who's standing right there in front of him with shadows cast over one side of his face, scanning the observation deck for the missing backpack. _Harry_ , the one he's been trying to find all this time.

Louis sucks in a breath, and it must be loud enough to carry over the white noise of the city surrounding them, because Gracie gasps and squeezes Harry's hand.

When Harry looks up and into Louis' eyes, he swears the entire world stops spinning.

His grip on Gracie’s backpack tightens and he can’t breathe, he physically can't breathe. His lungs won’t allow more air into his body no matter how hard he tries. It's like he's been paralyzed, and he faintly wonders if he'll ever breathe again, or if he'll die right here and have his last vision be of Harry in his oversized coat and brown suede boots and ripped up skinny jeans.

Louis can't say he would complain.

They walk towards each other timidly, like they’re standing on thin ice, and Louis watches as Harry's face is flooded with color as he steps out of the shadows. His lips quiver like he’s going to say something but then he freezes up again, his mouth hanging open like he forgot what he was trying to say.

And it would be funny, but Louis’ tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth too, because it's him, it's really _him_ , he came _back_.

“It’s you,” Harry whispers. The wind ruffles his hair and stains his cheeks pink, and Louis thinks back to that day at the airport when he bumped into him accidentally, when all he could do was apologize before the rush of the crowd pulled him away.

Thank God fate gave him a second chance, because Louis has never seen anyone quite as beautiful as Harry in his life, with his hair draping elegantly down his shoulders and his parted lips and his sparkling eyes. He’s breathtaking.

“It’s me,” Louis says, nothing more than a breath of air. They’re still moving closer, like they’re two planets trapped in each other’s orbits, and Louis still hasn’t looked away from Harry’s eyes yet, doesn’t think he can.

“Are you Louis?” a quiet voice asks, and it takes Louis a moment to collect himself before he’s able to break away from Harry's gaze. Gracie's eyes, a forest green identical to Harry's, blink owlishly up at him.

Louis nods slowly, smiling at her.

“Yes,” he says softly.

“You’re Louis?” Harry breathes, and when Louis meets his eyes again, he’s looking at him with this expression on his face like he can’t believe it, like he’s reliving his past and seeing his future all at once, and Louis can’t help but laugh because he knows the feeling.

At the sound of Louis’ laugh, Harry’s lips tilt up into a smile, and—

He has dimples. Louis is actually going to melt into a puddle on the floor.

“I believe this is yours,” he says to Gracie, offering the tiger out to her like a peace offering. She chews on her lip for a moment before a grin begins to spread across her face.

“I’m Gracie,” she tells him, as if he doesn't already know. She reaches out for her backpack with the tiny mittened hand that’s not too busy clutching Harry's like a lifeline. "This is my dad. His name is Harry," and she looks up at Harry with so much love and adoration that it makes Louis’ heart ache.

“Hi, Gracie,” he says, and she lights up like a Christmas tree. Louis looks back up into Harry’s eyes, the eyes that have never once left his face since they first saw him a minute ago. “Harry.”

Harry’s eyes blaze with so much intensity that Louis swears his heart goes off tempo for a beat or two.

“And who’s this?” Louis asks Gracie, waving the tiger’s little arm.

“That’s Hobbes,” she says proudly as she takes him from Louis’ hands.

It’s then that the guard pokes his head around the door and clears his throat, breaking them out of their reverie. Harry turns his head to acknowledge him, but his eyes still never leave Louis’ face, like they’ve been superglued to him. Louis feels his cheeks go warm under the attention.

“Well, um,” Harry says, blinking a few times and shaking his head like he’s waking himself up from a dream. “We’d better go.”

Louis nods at them, trying to keep his expression neutral, because of course they have to go, it’s getting late and it's probably way past Gracie’s bedtime. Louis understands, he tells himself, swallowing down the lump building in his throat, he really does—

But then Harry’s reaching out for him with a hesitant smile on his face, and maybe Louis didn’t understand after all.

“Shall we?” Harry whispers.

Louis takes his hand.

“Harry,” he says as they make their way back to the elevators. His cheeks ache with the force of his smile. “It’s so lovely to meet you.”

The guard lets Gracie push the button for the ground floor. He catches Louis' eye and winks.

 _Magic_ , Louis thinks to himself as he looks down at their hands, his fingers and Harry's fingers pressed together like a promise. _Magic_.

**Author's Note:**

> THANK YOU FOR READING!
> 
> i started thinking about the concept of this fic in february and started writing it in june. now i'm finally finished with it and it's _november_. but, that's show biz, folks. sometimes it's better to let the story come to you.
> 
> you can find me on tumblr at [hazaesthetic](hazaesthetic.tumblr.com) if you want to drop by and say hi! i'm literally always up to talk to people, so please don't hesitate to tell me what you thought of this! i'll be happy to answer literally any questions you have :)
> 
> also, [here's](http://hazaesthetic.tumblr.com/post/133842733225/the-sound-of-shooting-stars-by-theseblueskies-it) the tumblr post for this fic and [here's](http://hazaesthetic.tumblr.com/post/133843864785/the-sound-of-shooting-stars-a-fic-mix-for-the) the 8tracks mix, in case anyone wants to check those out!
> 
> ALL THE LOVE. ♡


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